SAN FRANCISCO — Congratulations to Pivot3, a startup that makes something called “High-Definition Storage.” It won this year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Best Virtualization Software award today, over a lot of more well-known companies.
Pivot3 now is touting a strategy called “serverless computing,” which enables users to “absorb” compute-intensive workloads that normally run on stand-alone application servers into Pivot3’s own X86-based storage nodes. This convergence of app server and storage array apparently is a dramatic improvement on conventional setups in terms of acquisition and deployment costs, power consumption, heat generation, and overall rack space.
So it looks like the “serverless computing” angle is simply incorporating the server functions into storage arrays, which is what a lot of systems do anyway in some configurations. In any case, the heyday of the dedicated server appears to be long past, and this may be yet another marker along that evolving trail.
We may need to look more closely at this development. Stay tuned. In the meanwhile, go here for your Pivot3 homework reading assignment.
Also, to find out more about today’s LinuxWorld news, see my eWEEK story from earlier today. My knowledgeable colleague Henry Kingman also has written a gaggle of stories for our Linux & Open Source section and at our sister site, LinuxDevices.com.
Check ’em out.