DataCore's Parallel Server is loose with 'lighthouse' customers

DataCore's long-touted Parallel Server has reached production at “lighthouse customers” and should formally go on sale later in 2017.

So said the company's CEO George Teixeira, in a chat with The Register today in Sydney, Australia.

Parallel Server sees multi-core x86 servers processing IO in parallel, an arrangement Teixeira said was common when he was a lad and x86 servers were just starting to replace minicomputers and ensuring multiple CPUs handled traffic just made sense. But Teixeira says these days developers and architects just assume the OS can handle I/O and don't give it a second thought despite having cores-a-plenty to play with … until things slow down to unacceptable speeds. And that happens comes quite often these days as analytics applications send floods of data into servers.

Enter Parallel Server and an ambition to position it as enabling Server Consolidation 2.0. VMware drove the first round of consolidation by making sure servers' capacity was properly shared and scheduled. Teixeira thinks the IO bottleneck is now the limiting factor preventing full utilisation of servers. Parallel Server addresses that by creating an abstraction layer that lets applications work all of a machine's available threads, rather than driving IO through the one running the application.

As we've previously reported, the results can be astoundingly fast.

And soon those results will be available in Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Teixeira said Microsoft likes the idea of tech to speed its cloudy servers, because it should help drive adoption of SQL Server in Azure. And once an organisation goes for SQL Server, Microsoft knows that plenty more subscriptions follow.

This year, Teixeira said DataCore will concentrate on ironing out the kinks in the product, getting it into Azure and forming relationships with application vendors, database-focussed VARs and others he feels will be needed to make Parallel Server.

By 2018 he hopes the company will be on a winner, although he's not sure what to expect. “I wish I knew how big Parallel Server could get,” he said.

Whatever the scale of the opportunity, Teixeira is happy to be expanding beyond the storage market, which he said continues to offer double-digit annual growth and has propelled DataCore to a decade of profits without ever quite making the company a star. ®