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Cloud Expo: Article

EMC to Make Its Own Servers

EMC maintains that it’s not going into the general-purpose server business
By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
May 29, 2012 07:15 AM EDT
Reads:
 4,519

EMC is making servers to go in arrays so they can cuddle up to apps inside VMware virtual machines and reduce latency, an idea EMC's had kicking around in varying degrees of discretion since last year.

The Register saw two of them at EMC World in Vegas this week.

It said one looked like a blade server with two in a 4U.

The other looked like a 1U microserver and said it was given to understand the thing included a quad-core x85 chip, 1GB of RAM and a PCI SLIC I/O card. It imagines it "being mounted vertically to provide a very dense compute rack footprint." Apparently CMO Jeremy Burton talked about "two rows of eight servers inside the array, 16 servers in total."

The Register heard Pat Gelsinger, the Intel émigré who's believed to be EMC's CEO-in-waiting, say that the company's main arrays - VMAX, VNX and Isilon - would all have such server engines inside them in two years. That includes controllers.

EMC maintains that it's not going into the general-purpose server business, a statement that begs the question: what exactly is a general-purpose server these days?

The VMs will surely wrap themselves around the array operating system. Suppose EMC uses flash as an accelerant. Why will EMC need Cisco's UCS servers in Vblocks?

Published May 29, 2012 – Reads 4,519
Copyright © 2012 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

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