Home Enterprise Podcast #105: Infrastructure Trends from Edge to Core

Podcast #105: Infrastructure Trends from Edge to Core

by Harold Fritts

Storagereview.com has always had a strong relationship with Supermicro with engagements in hardware testing, integration, and multi-vendor environments. There seems to be a Supermicro server somewhere in the lab. Supermicro has been at the forefront of hardware and software development innovation.

Storagereview.com has always had a strong relationship with Supermicro with engagements in hardware testing, integration, and multi-vendor environments. There seems to be a Supermicro server somewhere in the lab. Supermicro has been at the forefront of hardware and software development innovation.

Supermicro SuperEdge nodes pulled out side view

This week, Brian invited Supermicro’s Michael McNerney to discuss the company’s vision for the future and a look in the rearview mirror. Michael is Vice President of Marketing and Network Security with Supermicro, so he is well-positioned to discuss what Supermicro’s vision is for the future and how technology drives the development of data center servers and edge markets.

The discussion on this podcast covers hardware and software, how it affects server design, private-cloud versus public-cloud, and what drives innovation. Michael brings his deep knowledge of the server environment and discusses Supermicro’s continued innovation path.

The timestamp for each section is found below if you want to hop around.

00:00 Introduction

  • Michael’s focus at Supermicro
  • Security is a primary focus
  • Supermicro is prioritizing internal and external security
  • Attack vectors

05:00 Modernizing

  • Accelerating innovation
  • What is exciting to Supermicro
  • Hardware development is moving quickly
  • Trying to keep up with the enterprise requirements
  • Trying to arbitrate for our customers
  • Keeping up with innovations

10:00 New form factors

  • Considerations for new hardware
  • Designs for new technology
  • Discussion around building blocks for design
  • Customers want to design around workloads

15:00 Applications dictating system design

  • Optimizing infrastructure for customer workloads
  • Design goes all the way up the stack
  • Software-Defined market
  • What do they see in traditional architecture
  • Cloud vs. non-cloud, scale-out, architecture

20:00 On-premise cloud architecture

  • Everything is being built on cloud architecture
  • It’s not just the public cloud
  • On-premise cloud
  • Budgets are 50-50 public cloud vs. private cloud
  • Enterprises what to own their own business
  • The public cloud has that convenience factor

25:00 Addressing complexity

  • Controlling efficiencies
  • Deployments have different benefits for different workloads
  • High-value edge deployments

30:00 Serviceability at the edge

  • What’s different for edge
  • Reliability for edge deployments
  • Software is designed to support reliability and uptime
  • No silver bullet
  • Thermals have an effect
  • Physical challenges
  • Edge boxes are benefiting from data center designs

35:00 Cooling

  • Liquid cooling is more efficient
  • There is a greater adoption level for liquid cooling
  • Reliability argument

40:00 Latest Vision

  • Software v Hardware
  • S/W staff has tripled over the past five years
  • Software investment is huge
  • GPU portfolio is compelling
  • Sorting through GPU technology and how it fits into the decision matrix
  • What are the options

45:00 Wrap up and closing

Video pod on YouTube

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