The Evaluator Group Composable Infrastructure Evaluation Guide is part of a series of documents designed to help readers understand new technologies and their application and to evaluate alternatives. These guides are for IT professionals seeking a neutral, objective discussion of the design considerations behind new products, technologies and trends. Evaluator Group Evaluation Guides are not vendor-sponsored but offered as part of a paid subscription. They are developed based on reviews of the technology options and strategic analyses of how they can best be used in today’s information storage environments.
This Evaluation Guide focuses on technology education, explaining what “composable” means, where this technology came from and what to expect as it matures. While it does contain some information about current vendors in this space, it’s not focused on supporting a product evaluation, per se. It should be noted that this is a look at an early-stage technology and as such, available products, approaches and even defining characteristics are somewhat fluid. Consequently, this guide does not include EvaluScale, the comparison tool that ranks characteristics of different products in a given technology category.
Evaluator Group defines Composable Infrastructure as a comprehensive, rack-scale compute environment that uses software-defined networking techniques to connect independent servers, storage and switch chassis or modules by PCIe, Ethernet or Infiniband. Designed for maximum efficiency and agility, it maps pooled (but disaggregated), physical resources to create (or “compose”) bare-metal compute instances as needed, with a minimum of time and effort, often under programmatic control. It provides a dynamic compute environment for applications running on operating systems, VMs or containers that also supports rapid reconfiguration, or dissolution back to the component resources. Composable systems are deployed and maintained by core IT personnel.
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