Yeah, no
You don't know what you are talking about.
First of all, you must have missed that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook actually design/manufacture their own hardware and their software stack tightly integrates with that hardware. Microsoft uses Denali for Azure, Facebook has Bryce Canyon, Google's Spanner and Colossus run on custom hardware as does Amazon. The software only model is a Wall Street marketing ploy to keep stock prices up and keep the Ponzi scheme running.
You also seem to have missed that Intel Skylake is using more power per core than Haswell and Broadwell and that every single hyperscale and service provider is going hard towards ASICs. And we haven't even scratched AIML on GPUs. You also must have missed the whole blockchain crypto circus on GPU and custom ASICs. In other words, the free lunch of ever increasing Intel CPU power that allowed ballooning crappy overhead from "software only" vendors like Vmware is coming to an end rather quickly.
We've tested HX with Optane and Samsung SSDs and I happen to know a thing or two about those All NVMe systems. The "slower" SSD clusters obliterated the VSAN and Nutanix boxes during the POC, our DBAs refused to continue testing anything but HX going forward. For reference, we run 80,000 MS SQL databases. To everyone's surprise the HX boxes were also much faster than our EMC XtremIO and more or less matched our Pure arrays but scaled much higher and thus were a lot faster and bigger than anything Pure could build in a single array. I am not going to say anything about the All NVMe test clusters we are testing because I promised the Cisco folks not to. But I will say this: Holy Shit, Batman!
I get that you are repeating this "software only" because we hear it all the time and it comes from all those yahoos who don't have hardware.Wwhat else are they going to say? In reality all the big players are going full on integrated stack because there lies performance and efficiency.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
