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I thought I was going to learn all about servers, but I got a lesson in storage instead. I attended the recent Open Server Summit conference down in Silicon Valley, figuring that it was a great opportunity to become a little smarter about server architectures and designs. There was no shortage of new stuff for me to try to cram into my personal nonvolatile memory (read: brain), but I was surprised that so many of the new developments in server techs were related to storage. In fact, if I closed my eyes and imagined that I was at the Open Storage Summit instead, the presentations I heard on servers and storage would've made just as much sense. At first, I thought it was a little odd that so much of the talk at a server conference was about storage, but the reasons sunk in pretty quickly: convergence and solid-state. Because convergence is so tightly linked to the abstraction of controlling software from physical devices such as servers and storage, it's ironic that that decoupling actually puts greater focus on the hardware in a ...