3
Hardware Technologies and Platforms
This chapter is dedicated to everything related to the hardware part of platform design including form factors, proprietary and standard-based systems, mezzanine cards, interconnect technologies and packet processing technologies for data, control and management planes.
3.1 Different Form Factors
There are many different reasons for chassis form factor selection for a particular product. Sometimes such a selection is dictated by corporate policy, hardware and/or software platform reuse, internal or external perceptions, strong opinions or other stakeholders. There should be no mistake that in some cases the decision is not purely technical. In other cases the opinions, perceptions and thus decisions can be based on prior experience that might or might not be applicable in the particular scenario.
It is no easy task to compare different form factors or even products of the same form factor. Processors are usually measured based on absolute performance, performance-power efficiency, sometimes called performance/watt, or cost-performance efficiency referred to as performance/$. Systems can be measured similarly.
Sun has introduced good metric called SWaP standing for Space, Watts, and Performance, which is similar to the processor measurement, but takes into account the system size:
where,
- Performance is measured by industry-standard audited benchmarks; ...
