Cavium CloudScale Rack Represents Complete Data Center Solution

With the data center in general only growing in importance, it's not surprising to see more operations come out to make data centers easier to establish and manage. Cavium is no different, and has brought out its new CloudScale Rack to serve as a way to establish a complete cloud data center all from one handy package.

Cavium's CloudScale Rack is built around a set of customer platforms and Cavium's own portfolio, the combination of which helps to deliver several key points of value. Cavium's chief technical officer (CTO) and corporate vice president / general manager Raghib Hussain offered elaboration on what that meant. Most modern servers, Hussain noted, were built around legacy systems, and over time as well, meaning more systems became legacy in the process. This left systems unable to cope with the increasing complexity—not to mention sheer amounts of data—that data centers must now handle.

Hussain went on to note that servers weren't optimized for the workloads involved using, once again, legacy processors and needing a slew of supplementary systems just to handle the load. Things like flow-based switching and being able to rapidly put new protocols to work just weren't options, until things like Cavium CloudScale Rack stepped in. With CloudScale Rack, users are able to better bring in switching tools, intelligent network interface controllers (NICs), and better make systems that adapt to the current needs in the field. This puts Cavium in an excellent position overall, Hussain also noted, as it's better able to accommodate not only needs today, but it's likely able to better serve needs tomorrow.

There's always been something to say for flexibility and versatility in the field; as Heinlein once noted, specialization is for insects. Being able to handle more than one job, or class of job, is a great selling point for anything from systems to employees, and Cavium's systems look to do just that. With so many organizations still operating based on older materials—whether just unable to upgrade or unwilling to upgrade before the fullest value of these systems is realized—Cavium's ability to launch wide-scale improvement is hard to pass up.

The data center's growing importance in the field underscores the value of tools designed to make it better, and Cavium's CloudScale Rack is out to improve data centers. From complete teardowns to augmentations of current operations, CloudScale Rack looks like it will fit readily into a number of use cases, and that makes this a great point to start considering future options.

Edited by Maurice Nagle