The End of Servers as We Know Them?
Powerful prediction that servers will be no more in 5 to 10 years.
Are we seeing the end of servers as we know them in the enterprise data center? I don’t mean companies going to the public cloud and consuming serverless. I mean, no more black/gray boxes inside of traditional server racks.
Ironically, I just spent half of my morning chasing down $150,000 in demo equipment shipped to the wrong address. How’s your day? But I digress.
Technologies such as S3, Serverless, DBaaS are erasing server host constructs. We can now write code that runs on a platform against some persistent data layer. It’s becoming common to think about solving the logical problem by cobbling together the various services.
Today, those various services run on boxes in someone’s data center. AWS has to figure out have to make PaaS seem like a service free of the boundaries of a system with 4-processors and 4TB of RAM. These types of concerns move down to the enterprise data center.
This morning, I read a great piece on TheNextPlatform talking about PCI 4 and PCI 5 as the future of enterprise data center design. It’s a maturing view similar to HPE’s The Machine. While many people (me included) expected The Machine to be a genuine product, it is aspirational and a journey to the next data center architecture.
I’d love to know what you think. Will large-scale data center design abandon the traditional standalone system? Or will we buy bigger and bigger boxes for the foreseeable future?