The boffins, Gianluca Iannaccone and Sylvia Ratnasamy, have developed what they call “router bricks" for the reused servers which should save cash for IT departments. At the heart of the system is an open source software package called Click Router, developed at MIT a decade ago. This ties the servers together for their new roles in the data center.
The main reason this can be done is because of Intel's multi-core Nehalem chips, which provide the bandwidth and gigbit speed for these router bricks to perform at enterprise levels.
Intel recycles servers into routers
Posted on Friday, May 07 2010 @ 7:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck