3 Unexpected Design Principles For The Next-gen Data Center

By Phil Straw, SoftIron CEO

January 20, 2020

There are a lot of ideas and opinions about what the ‘data center of the future’ really looks like.

To us, it’s simple and is based on 3 defining principles:

    1. Task-specific
    2. High-performance
    3. Secure provenance

Simple in principle, but in practice? Not so easy.

Why? Because it requires a very different way of doing things. Something we were prepared to do from the very beginning because we had nothing to lose.

Software-defined everything is here already, and while it’s done its job to evolve the data center, we all too often forget that underpinning it all, is hardware. Yes, we believe in a software-defined future that offers limitless flexibility, adaptability, and genuine bottom-line efficiencies, but none of that matters if your infrastructure is re-purposed, sub-par and potentially compromised.

Superior, task-specific components

We do not optimize commodity hardware or configure the cheapest components. We design and build our appliances from scratch, in California. They’re purpose-built to optimize their specific role in the data center. We start with a sharp, clear focus on what our appliances need to do (and what they don’t need to do). We even read the code the appliances will run, line-by-line. That may sound dull but the gains we’ve made are thrilling, and the peace of mind it offers our customers is priceless.

True High Performance

Specialization fosters performance breakthroughs, and task-specific design reveals opportunities for improvement at a granular level, accumulating to deliver the leading edge in density, performance, and efficiency.

Secure Provenance

The very foundation of data security is hardware provenance, yet most brands use components and code from unverifiable sources. At SoftIron, not only do we control the entire design and build process, but we manufacture and assemble all products in-house, including electronics subassemblies. The result is a truly open book: auditable provenance on all of our data center appliances – the foundation of true security – and SoftIron is the only manufacturer to offer it.

If your idea of a security check is looking at the logo on the box, you may need to dig a little deeper.

If it’s declared a national emergency, it’s probably a thing.

On the fifth of May 2019, The White House decreed a National Emergency on Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain.

Most high-tech OEMs and service providers are powered on hardware and software that could be compromised at its root level by a tiny chip intentionally implanted by state operatives, or an accidental inclusion of malware from a downloaded bit of code.

Like a cereal company whose product is full of cancer-causing pesticides, the world’s largest institutions don’t want you to focus on how widespread security exploits are in the complete end-to-end supply chain for all of the high-tech products involved in their operations, because it’s bad for business.

Discover the reasons why transparency into the origins of our hardware and software is important for assuring the integrity of critical systems and data, and how your enterprise can address this challenge by passing the test of secure provenance. Download the white paper here

SoftIron creates the world’s best appliances for scale-out data center solutions, delivering the data center of the future, today. HyperDrive® storage appliance is custom-designed and built to optimize Ceph, unleashing the full potential of the technology for the data center. HyperDrive is a high-performance, scale-out solution that runs at wire-speed, and at less than 100W per 1U form factor. Our unifying Storage Manager is the first of its kind: unite, monitor and control all your Ceph storage on the one system. An intuitive dashboard makes control and optimization easy. Learn more at softiron.com or build and price your storage cluster with our online HyperDrive Configurator here.

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