Pensando Systems Exits Stealth Mode With Plans To Take On Amazon AWS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Pensando Systems Exits Stealth Mode With Plans To Take On Amazon AWS

While normally we don't cover hardware start-ups on Phoronix, Pensando Systems has just exited stealth and given their focus will be heavily involved with Linux and in fact already have their first kernel driver mainlined...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Pensando-Exits-Stealth

[boxie]

ok, I failed to penetrate the marketing fluff there.. my eyes seemed to glaze over - what exactly are they offering?

some kit to run in your own DC? a service?

[Linuxxx]

They are claiming 5-9x current industry performance / scalability / latency / jitter

That sentence really makes me eager to know what kind of magic Google is casting upon their Stadia Gaming Service/Cloud...

I mean, let's just try to imagine what kind of Linux kernel they are running for the lowest latency possible:

- Hard real-time?
AFAIK, the RT patch-set can still be problematic, especially for games which trigger all kinds of sub-systems of the kernel...

- Soft real-time?
I think this is pretty much guaranteed, since Android's Linux kernel also always enables PREEMPT.
(So basically something akin to Ubuntu's "lowlatency" kernel, and NOT Fedora\RedHat / openSUSE / Debian / Arch\Manjaro / Clear_Linux alike!)

- What about the CPU scheduler?
I believe CFS is still king here, since I can't imagine them using out-of-tree patches for the likes of 'MuQSS' or 'PDS'!

- Last but certainly not least, what about all those Intel hardware bugs / mitigations?
More than anything, these badly affect latency-times the most! Still, Google just can't turn them off now, can they?

Man, so many unknowns; I just hope one day we'll learn about Stadia's Linux kernel configuration, so we can all rejoice and enjoy games on Linux with the smoothest frame-rate possible for our hardware!
[And until that day, Ubuntu's "lowlatency" Linux kernel already does a damn fine job! Thanks @ Canonical for being so mindful and compiling these for us!]

[F.Ultra]

ok, I failed to penetrate the marketing fluff there.. my eyes seemed to glaze over - what exactly are they offering?

some kit to run in your own DC? a service?

From what I could gather they sell some kind of card that you put in your servers that can perform some kind of cloud like tasks and those cards talks to each other to create some kind of cloud like service:

Pensando’s platform includes hardware and a software stack. The hardware, Naples 100 and Naples 25, is a programmable, distributed services card (DSC) that can be installed in any server and scales linearly. The DSC allows cloud providers and other customers to offer a number of software-defined services simultaneously, while freeing up more expensive hardware resources like general-purpose CPU cycles. Jain said it operates at 100G wire-speed with high-performance and low latency. It’s compatible with virtual machines (VMs) or bare-metal servers as well as containerized workloads.

The platform also includes a lifecycle management tool called Venice that applies policies from a central location across all active Naples nodes running in clouds and on-premises infrastructure. It also performs tasks such as in-service software upgrades, always-on telemetry and visibility across the entire infrastructure.

The distributed architecture means customers “can provide services like load balancing, firewalls, encryption, visibility, networking services, SDN” wherever the data is located, Jain said. And this becomes especially relevant as more data — Gartner puts it at 75% by 2025 — is created and processed at the edge.

Another benefit for enterprise customers is that the software-defined platform eliminates the need for legacy appliances such as firewalls, load balancers, and encryption devices.

[boxie]

From what I could gather they sell some kind of card that you put in your servers that can perform some kind of cloud like tasks and those cards talks to each other to create some kind of cloud like service:

that is certainly more than I got

[ThoreauHD]

I'm guessing 100 GB/s backbone out of band cloud hardware RT linux botnet. Fun for the whole family. Like Drac or ILO on cloud crack.

[andyprough]

I've invented a type of chewing gum that you chew and then stretch between two network cards and get 8-19X performance. Where's my VC funding and my IPO? Less than a billion dollars for my press announcement and its just sheer discrimination.

[SyXbiT]

It is easy to hype. Do you think AWS has been sitting still?

[ehansin]

I'm not sure what it is, but I'm all for anyone that can give Bozo a run for his money - the more the merrier!

[F.Ultra]

It is easy to hype. Do you think AWS has been sitting still?

They don't really compete, it's just that Amazon are building their next gen EC2 instances on similar technology and now Pensado are selling that building blocks to you so you have have it in your local Data Center. That is also why they claim to have lower latency since their cards are local to your servers and not remote acess like the Amazon one is.