SoftIron's strategy to bring Ceph storage to the masses: 'A really, really sh*tty computer'... Storage startup SoftIron has launched three products designed to make it easier to deploy Ceph – a free software storage platform that supports block, object and file storage. New toys include an unusual 1U server based on ARM64 architecture; a gateway appliance that gets Ceph to play nicely with legacy enterprise environments …
For all of its good points, Ceph is very demanding wrt the hardware it's running on. In particular it's an atrocious CPU hog. Running it on systems with underpowered CPUs is not something I would want to be involved in. TBH this seems more like a publicity stunt than a serious offering.
Disclosure: I'm still technically a maintainer for Gluster, though I no longer work on it day to day.
"This means cool air from the fans blows over the drives first, and then the CPUs – which wouldn't make any sense in a compute server."
I don't think I've ever seen a server that didn't have the drive bays get cooling before the CPUs. I have seen some server designs that have drives on the rear as well as the front(only in situations where they are getting the most drive bays they can in a single system), but don't recall seeing any where they are only on the rear.
Since the motherboard doesn't heat up as much as standard X86 kit there's no need for active cooling in front of the board, so pulling in cool air using fans at the rear of the system is good enough, and the drives probably generate far more heat by comparison.
I have seen systems offered with a rear backplane only, and it's mostly related to odd/new requirements for building out storage clusters on Ceph and competing technologies. There's little need to outfit your head node/gateway with lots of memory or compute strength like we used to with older clusters, so there's a whole new market for cheap, dumb hardware to use as lightweight management nodes.
"For starters, it reverses the traditional storage server layout by moving CPUs to the front of the PCB and storage drives to the back. This means cool air from the fans blows over the drives first, and then the CPUs – which wouldn't make any sense in a compute server."
Such a configuration does not make any sense as data centres are often configured as cold and hot aisles where the front of the equipment (air intake) is installed facing the cold aisle and the rear (air exhaust) facing the hot aisle.
From the few photos on Softiron's website, this seems to be a misunderstanding by the reporter as there is a photo showing drive storage behind the front panel and the motherboard at the back of the system.
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