Stateless Hardware

True statelessness implies that components are interchangeable because their identity and “value” are defined elsewhere. In practice, modern data centers have rarely been stateless from the “power socket and Ethernet cable up." “Statelessness,” in this context, usually sits atop massive state stacks of servers and software. A core principle of SoftIron is that rack hardware should have no special significance except as compute, storage, acceleration, or network resources. Our hardware does not create topology or dependency constraints. There are no “sacred” machines. Instead, servers are simply vessels for resources, and act conjointly as a sea of resources without limits.