What Is a Programmable Data Center?

Evan Conrad says a programmable data center is a data center SF Compute has virtualized, so a customer gets the control that used to come with owning the hardware. A feature already shipping lets that customer subdivide an InfiniBand fabric without asking anyone to redraw the lines. Many clouds hand over a single fabric and then require a call when the boundaries need to move. Redrawing them on the fly fits a market where clusters scale up and down.

The same release is meant to make the capacity usable for platform-as-a-service companies. The goal is to virtualize the rest of what ownership used to include. The last shift like that was the arrival of cloud computing.