For all the superior features that low-power computing systems exhibit compared to conventional high-end server designs, there has been a common design axiom that both technological trends are based on: the main-board and its hardware components form the baseline, monolithic building block that the rest of the hardware/software stack design builds upon. In such conventional systems, the proportionality of IT resources is fixed during design time and remains static throughout machine lifetime, with known ramifications in terms of low system resource utilization, costly upgrade cycles and degraded energy proportionality.
dReDBox takes on the challenge of revolutionizing the low-power computing ecosystem by breaking once and for all server boundaries through materialization of the concept of disaggregation. Through a highly modular, rack-scale architecture, dReDBox specifies, designs and prototypes modular blocks of SoC-based microservers, memory and accelerators, interconnected via a high-speed, low-latency optical fabric and integrated into a single platform. In a dReDBox system, pool instances can be allocated in arbitrary sets, as driven by fit-for-purpose resource/power management software. dReDBox components allow for deployment in various integration form factors and target scenarios, as manifested by three target application use-cases, namely Video Surveillance, Network Analytics and Telecom.
Overall, dReDBox has the objective to design and develop a vertical approach for a flexible modular datacenter-in-a-box architecture. Its design aims at redefining the datacenter hardware building blocks by creating mainboard trays (dTRAYs) with homogeneous components that form resource pools (dBRICKs). dReDBox features a scalable hypervisor layer that abstracts all resource pools and orchestration software that manages and allocates resources to workloads. dReDBox delivers enhanced elasticity and improved virtual machine migration within the datacenter. The resource pools feature commodity, densely integrated, modular SoC-based compute blocks and high performance memory modules. The interconnect switching technology used features highly integrated, low-power, low-cost, low-footprint, and scalable technologies for module-to-module and tray-to-tray communication.
dReDBox has prototyped, notably for the first time, a fully integrated disaggregated datacenter, bringing together complementary assets from the hardware, network, operating system, orchestration and applications stacks. Using this prototype, the project has demonstrated the practical feasibility and economical viability of optically disaggregated datacenters, going well beyond previous state-of-the-art studies on disaggregation based on full/partial simulation of disaggregated infrastrucutre. dReDBox shows that disaggregated systems have the potential of improving the capital and operational costs thanks to tying the pay-as-you-grow model much tighter to actual hardware utilization and significant decrease of the required power budget.
