Will light replace cables in blade servers?

A start-up has plans to turn the traditional approach to blade servers on its ear, and it's not just smoke and mirrors. But it is light and mirrors.

For the past seven years, Lightfleet has been working on a technology that employs light signals to replace the cabling and switches typically used to connect various server nodes in a blade server. And as of December, it had delivered its first unit–to Microsoft's Research's labs.

Lightfleet's first product is code-named Beacon, a 32-node server that uses dual-core Intel processors along with standard off-the-shelf disks, memory, and storage all in a package that stands about 16 inches tall on a server rack (9U in server speak).

What's different is the way each node talks to the others, the so-called interconnections within the server. Although not typically the sexiest part of computing, the interconnections in a server blade play a critically important part in determining not just how fast it that server runs, but also how much power the whole data center uses and how much heat it throws off.

Just improving performance is a big deal. No matter how fast the chips and memory inside servers get, there is always the challenge of how fast one can connect the different nodes together. And, historically, the more nodes you put in a blade server, the more complex that job of interconnection gets.

But that's not the case with Lightfleet's approach. The company's motto–all to all, all at once–may sound like a bad reinterpretation of the Three Musketeers' slogan, but it's the key to how the company gets around the standard bottleneck.

Instead of having to pass the message from one server to the next or use a switch to route the various signals, each of Lightfleet's server nodes can broadcast the signal to all the others, and each node can receive the signal sent by every other node's transmitters.

Think of traditional signaling as trying to make a series of messenger deliveries throughout Manhattan. Whether you have a Ferrari or a Pinto, you are only going to move so fast through traffic. And even if you have a fleet of cars, things will only speed up so much. Plus you have the hassle of distributing all the packages.

More on this here: <a href='http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20002750-56.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1'>No Cables

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