Should server blade vendors be concerned with the software applications their customers are delivering? Conventional wisdom says no - just design the hardware to maximize performance on traditional axes: maximum compute power and maximum IO between CPUs, memory, network, and storage. But often surprises are found after hardware is in the field because designers don't anticipate how their customers intend to use the product. Trying to simply maximize hardware performance across all data paths can fail to address the key bottlenecks and issues that manifest themselves with emerging, rapidly evolving cloud computing use cases.  Read more »