#204 – Liqid Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Sumit Puri, CEO of Liqid Inc. Liqid has developed a composable infrastructure platform they call CDI or Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure. CDI enables IT organisations to take the building blocks of compute – storage, networking, CPUs, memory and GPUs then combine them dynamically in ways that address the processing needs of the enterprise. Customers use the technology to enable greater efficiency in the use of hardware and to truly deliver the software-defined data centre.

Sumit explains how the Liqid technology works across multiple fabrics that could be PCIe, Ethernet or InfiniBand. Customers have used the technology to fully exploit GPUs and to build the “impossible server” based on configurations not available from server manufacturers. However, there’s a whole lot more to this technology that makes it one of the most exciting areas in the data centre today.

For more on Liqid (yes, without the “u”), check out https://liqid.com.

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Timeline

• 00:00:00 – Intros
• 00:01:00 – Who are Liqid?
• 00:02:00 – How do we define composable?
• 00:04:20 – What components can Liqid compose?
• 00:06:20 – Composablility needs one or more fabrics
• 00:07:20 – How do we compose DRAM and memory?
• 00:09:20 – Data centre design will change with composable
• 00:11:50 – Server footprint can be optimised with disaggregated
• 00:12:57 – Have we seen this technology before?
• 00:15:34 – Let’s call it a fabric not a network!
• 00:17:30 – Liqid offers an API and “northbound” support
• 00:24:40 – Disaggregation enables the “impossible server”
• 00:27:40 – What other use cases can Liqid be used for?
• 00:33:00 – Virtualisation and composable create the lights-out data centre
• 00:34:37 – Honey Badger uses M.2 SSDs
• 00:40:00 – On-premises infrastructure isn’t going away
• 00:41:00 – FinOps raises its head again!
• 00:43:00 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

• #119 – Storage Hardware is Back!
• Liqid’s PCIe Fabric is the Key to Composable Infrastructure
• What is Software Composable Infrastructure?
• Mainframe – the Original Composable Infrastructure
• The Ideal of Composable Infrastructure

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