Background

I've written and commented in the past about the inevitability of a new class of Infrastructure called "composable", i.e. integrated server, storage and network infrastructure that allowed its users to "compose", that is to say configure, a physical server out of a collection of pooled server nodes, storage devices and shared network connections.[i]

The early exemplars of this class were pioneering efforts from Egenera and blade systems from Cisco, HP, IBM and others, which allowed some level of abstraction (a necessary precursor to composablity) of server UIDs including network addresses and storage bindings, and introduced the notion of templates for server configuration. More recently the Dell FX and the Cisco UCS M-Series servers introduced the notion of composing of servers from pools of resources within the bounds of a single chassis.[ii] While innovative, they were early efforts, and lacked a number of software and hardware features that were required for deployment against a wide spectrum of enterprise workloads.

What's New?

This morning, HPE put a major marker down in the realm of Composable Infrastructure with the announcement of Synergy, its new composable infrastructure system. HPE Synergy represents a major step-function in capabilities for core enterprise infrastructure as it delivers cloud-like semantics to core physical infrastructure. Among its key capabilities: