Liqid, provider of the world's most-comprehensive composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) platform, today announced a new Technical Insight Report from The Evaluator Group that effectively articulates the differences between two leading approaches to composability, blade server-based composable systems such as HPE Synergy, and PCI Express (PCIe)-based systems such as those provided by Liqid. The report, by Eric Slack, infrastructure analyst at Evaluator Group, entitled How Composable Infrastructure Address IT's Problem of Space and Time, is available now for free download. Slack finds that Liqid's composable disaggregated infrastructure overcomes the "fundamental limitations" of blade server-based composability by enabling IT users to dynamically orchestrate for the widest array of data center hardware, including GPUs and other valuable accelerators, via Liqid's composable software.

In the report, Slack observes that, in an ideal data center environment, a company's total hardware footprint (the space component), would be fully utilized, and therefore never idle (the time component). "IT resources required to support an enterprise's applications would be deployed in exactly the right amount, at exactly the right time, and then redeployed to another application when no longer needed, with the same level of precision," Slack writes.

Composable infrastructure technologies combines some of the best parts of converged and hyperconverged architectures to achieve this data center utopia. However, not all approaches to this composability are created equal.

"The range of resources that are available to be composed, the level of scalability, and the granularity -or how finely these resources can be allocated - are primary differentiating characteristics of the composable solution," Slack writes.

The blade-server composable model, typically associated with HPE and its Synergy product, allows for the orchestration of traditional SAS storage, compute resources, and networking. However, resources that are growing in demand like GPUs, NVMe storage, storage-class memory, FPGAs cannot be composed. Further, Slack finds, blade server-based systems tend to be vertically integrated, so disaggregated resources from third-party vendors cannot be introduced into these environments.

"The ability to compose multiple resource types from multiple vendors is key to this goal of addressing the problem of time and space," Slack writes. "This a fundamental limitation for the blade server architecture. Its proprietary chassis can only compose blades from one vendor, reducing the resource types and configurations that are available."

PCIe-based composable solutions enable the aggregation of GPU and other accelerators in tandem which is unavailable from server blade-based solutions like HPE Synergy. Adaptive, software-defined architectures like those provided by Liqid allow resources to be scaled without limit, across PCIe, Ethernet or Infiniband, making for more adaptive solution. It has the ability to deploy disaggregated resources as required to applications that need them, then redeploy for use with other applications once any given workload is completed.

"With our PCIe fabric architecture, Liqid enables organizations to configure the maximum amount of resources, in the widest possible varieties, to address the issues associated with limited data center footprints and the need to maximize resource utilization for next-gen workloads," said Sumit Puri, CEO & Cofounder, Liqid. "As artificial intelligence continues to transform the way we do business, conduct research, and live our lives in meaningful ways, IT organizations must ensure flexible compute capacity to handle the uneven workloads associated with AI operations. We believe Liqid composable disaggregated solutions provide such a foundation for fully maximizing the potential of artificial intelligence and other emerging, high-value applications."

Download How Composable Infrastructure Address IT's Problem of Space and Time from Evaluator Group and learn the benefits of Liqid's composable disaggregated infrastructure when compared to HPE Synergy. To learn more about Liqid, go to www.liqid.com.