> My preference is COTS as well, but, in all fairness, I'm rather unsure > if COTS is more a commonplace term than SOHO or if I'm just acclimated > to it more due to having been on the Beowulf list for so long. > > Let's have google decide: > https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=COTS%2CSOHO&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=7&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CCOTS%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CSOHO%3B%2Cc0 > > Looks like you're right. The turning point for COTS vs SOHO was about > 1995 from what I can tell.
guessing a lot of crosstalk with "south hampton" and "multiple of cot". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=COTS_ADJ%2CSOHO_ADJ&year_start=1900&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=2&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CCOTS_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CSOHO_ADJ%3B%2Cc0 about 10:1 in favor of COTS, with SOHO maybe a bit pre-bubble in flavor. to me at least, they aren't very similar in meaning. COTS refers mainly to the property of being in volume production, almost to the point of being fungible. SOHO is more of a market segment - sub-enterprise but more serious than pure consumer (a SOHO switch might not be rackmount, but perhaps managable and in a metal case; a NAS might be desktop but with support for LDAP/AD, perhaps replication.) I think the failure of 10G to ride COTS is interesting. part of it is demand-side: most of the market just isn't gagging for it (there's no exponential Moore's law of consumption). and vendors have utterly failed to make it cheap (or easy) enough to tempt consumers. and IB, SAS, FC have sucked up most of the oxygen where performance does matter... it seems like 10G vendors also made a tactical error by perseverating so much about power (and cable length). yes, 10GbT requires a lot of processing, but there was a market that would have accepted 20W phys that only reached 15M. they lost early adopters to IB - more than just a beachhead. so now what? 10G isn't COTS really, and doesn't seem to be getting there. 40/100G has a high-margin niche, but it's probably not big enough to make it bigtime (esp without any help from HPC - firmly held IB territory.) I'll throw this out there: Intel seems mostly directionless, and Thunderbolt is a good example. regards, mark hahn. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
