The growing popularity of the Open Compute Project has created interest among numerous organizations for highly customizable solutions that can be tailored toward a specific need. However, not every company has the resources to build its own hardware to such exacting specifications. This trend has placed some pressure on original equipment manufacturers, since it is more difficult to build hardware for the wide variety of needs in today’s business technology ecosystem. Rorke Global Solutions, a business unit of the Avnet Embedded division of Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, recently addressed the demand for highly customizable equipment with the launch of its Paladin server building blocks.
The Paladin servers are designed to fulfill industry needs across numerous sectors, with software that is closely associated with its hardware. Because the two stacks are so closely connected, the equipment can fulfill a broad spectrum of technology needs, including IT infrastructure, digital signage and security. These solutions have already been developed to support numerous verticals such as retail, medical and cloud hosting. In addition, many of the configurations are compliant with Open Compute Project standards.
“The Paladin portfolio of servers offers our customers a family of proven, tested, and integrated hardware and software to deliver their overall solution,” said Chuck Kostalnick, senior vice president of Avnet Embedded. “The Paladin family of servers fills gaps in previously underserved markets and allows us to leverage the entire Avnet Embedded supplier portfolio to tailor perfect-fit solutions for our customers.”
One of the key benefits of the Paladin family of servers is that they can be purpose-built for specific applications. Rorke recently showcased this with its Digital Signage Media Player, which can be used in retail and information outlets such as kiosks or medical waiting areas. The offering comes with an integrated content management system, allowing organizations to more easily manage their digital displays.
“By pairing Intel RCM with Rorke Global Solutions’ Paladin digital signage media player, retailers and small businesses get a fully integrated digital signage solution to reach their customers with personalized, relevant content near the point-of-sale,” said Joe Jensen, general manager of Intel’s Retail Solutions Division. “Using the Intel RCM software, users can launch attention-grabbing campaigns with ease across multiple touch points, ensuring they are reaching the right customer, at the right time, with the right product.”
Rorke Global is a Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner.
Cloud infrastructure: Customization or standardization?
The trend toward customization of cloud solutions may seem to conflict with the traditional paradigm of standardization that has driven cloud adoption. However, standardized approaches produce the added benefit of more predictable results, and these options are typically easier to deploy. At the same time, many organizations have discovered that one-size-fits-all approaches to IT are not able to keep up with modern business needs.
As Silicon Angle’s Mellisa Tolentino recently noted, this has pushed IT infrastructure toward “hyperconvergence,” in which technology components are packaged together and optimized accordingly. Much like what happened with the cloud washing trend, Tolentino noted that vendor hype has created some confusion regarding what a converged model should deliver. As organizations look toward CI solutions, it is important to focus on the following features:
- Standardization
- Automation
- Unified monitoring and management
- Integration
- Turnkey solution
Features such as automation and standardization have been staples of cloud services, and the CI model pushes the envelop further by focusing on integrating multiple solutions so that they can be more easily monitored, managed and optimized. With hardware such as the Paladin server family, organizations can gain the best of both worlds by adopting highly customizable infrastructure that is built to industry standards.
