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Liqid, a spelling-challenged startup that has been gaining visibility as a provider of composable infrastructure products, revealed this week at the Supercomputing 2017 conference that its Liqid Grid will be released to general availability in Q1 2018.
Liqid Grid is a package that uses an intelligent PCI-Express (PCIe) fabric switch with Liqid’s Command Center software to enable bare-metal composable infrastructure. The announcement was made Nov. 14 at the conference in Denver.
Composable infrastructure is a trendy infrastructure architecture that was helped along by HPE’s entry into the genre a few years ago. It is designed to ensure that the exact amount of computing resources—from processing power and storage to network fabric and virtualization—can be rapidly pulled together from a single resource pool to support an application, and then returned to the pool when they’re no longer needed for the workload. It’s a just-in-time approach that enables optimization of resources at all times.
Liqid Grid enables static legacy infrastructure to scale up on demand to better manage the explosion of data pouring into data stores from cloud, enterprise, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT)-driven environments.
The solution, called Liqid Composable, uses industry-standard data center components to deliver a flexible, scalable architecture built from pools of disaggregated resources. Computing, network, storage and graphics processing devices are interconnected with PCIe storage cards to deliver configurable bare-metal servers sized with the exact physical resources required by the application being deployed, the company said.
Liqid Grid, a managed fabric switch, allows core system resources to be instantly interconnected into bare-metal servers through a PCIe fabric and dynamically reconfigured as needed. Liqid Command Center is the management software that automates, orchestrates and composes physical servers from pools of bare-metal resources.
Specifications for Liqid Grid PCIe switching fabric include:
- managed PCIe Gen 3.0 switching fabric;
- 24-ports of Gen 3.0 x4 (configurable to x8 or x16);
- bandwidth of 192 GB/s (full duplex);
- switching latency of ~150 ns; and
- scalable fabric expandable to connect thousands of devices.
Key features of Liqid Command Center (software), which is composable infrastructure management software thatautomates, orchestrates and dynamicallycomposes physical bare-metal servers:
- fabric management software for bare-metal machine orchestration;
- policy-based automation and dynamic provisioning of resources;
- advanced cluster, machine, and device statistics and monitoring;
- multiple control methods including GUI and RESTful API; and
- scalable architecture supporting high availability (HA).
Liqid Composable will be available in two different configurations in order to better meet the diverse needs of IT users across vertical markets:
- Liqid Grid with Liqid Command Center: Liqid Grid comes integrated with Liqid Command Center, delivering dynamic control of system resources, enabling true hardware disaggregation and bare-metal server orchestration.
- Developer’s Kit: For users looking to experience composable infrastructure solutions from Liqid to immediately improve datacenter resource utilization with a turn-key solution, a complete developer’s kit is available. With computing, network, storage and graphics processing devices included in the kit, users are able to begin developing their applications using Liqid Grid and Command Center with a fully integrated, rack-mountable enclosure.
For more information, go here.