One of the sure signs that a new technology is having some real impact on the industry, as a whole, is when it starts changing other technologies, products, and processes that touch it. In part, this is a simple reflection that a vendor or a small group of vendors aren't the only ones who care about their new shiny-ness. Press releases, consortia, and partnerships are all well and good. But the real proof of acceptance is when other companies and customers start spending real money and changing their own plans and products.
We're seeing this happening with server virtualization. IT shops have started to rethink the processes that they use to allocate new computing resources to users. Some at the forefront have even made virtual servers, rather than physical ones, their default unit of computing.
We're also seeing changes in the way that servers are designed and built. In the x86 processor world, Intel VT and AMD-V attacked some of the most fundamental difficulties of virtualizing x86 hardware. Both companies are continuing to introduce hardware virtualization enablers to address things like I/O performance, virtualization's handling of memory, and compatibility of virtual machines across multiple generations of hardware.
We're also seeing changes in the way that servers are designed and built. Fundamentally, the issue is this. Server virtualization's first big win was in providing a path to consolidate x86 servers that were otherwise very lightly utilized--5 percent or below in many cases. Virtualization can up that figure closer to 50 percent.
So how does this change server design? Servers are designed and configured to be "balanced." This means that processing speed, memory performance and capacity, and I/O ideally don't limit each other. (In practice, fundamental technology limits dictate certain inequalities, but the system designer's job is to work around these as much as possible.) Consider if you put the latest quad-core screamer in a PC configured with only 256MB of memory and a slow serial port coming out the back. It wouldn't run most applications well--however speedy the processor.
Virtualization doesn't actually make the processor faster. But it does tend to make the processor do more work and thereby makes the other system components do more work as well. In practice this means that virtualized servers need correspondingly more memory and more network connections. And that's exactly the sort of thing that we're seeing.
To pick just one recent announcement, consider this September 10 press release from Dell:
The PowerEdge M905 delivers the ultimate four-socket blade-based virtualization performance and is the first blade server to support 11 tiles and 66 Virtual Machines (VM) in VMmark testing. The PowerEdge M805 delivers the same number of DIMM slots in a two-socket blade that requires a four-socket blade from either HP or IBM. With a choice of hypervisors including Citrix XenServer, VMware, and now Microsoft Hyper-V, PowerEdge servers can deliver the optimal platform for virtualized environments. The Dell PowerEdge M805 and M905 servers are now available worldwide with a starting price of $1,699 and $4,999 USD respectively...In addition to the new servers, Dell announced full, high-speed 10Gb Ethernet and 8Gb Fibre Channel switches and mezzanine cards designed to provide customers increased bandwidth and performance.
I'll just note a few things here:
- More memory in servers is all the rage. That's because there's a fairly strong correlation between how much work a processor is doing and how much memory it needs to store the associated data and instructions. Memory requirements have been going up forever, of course, but server virtualization has accelerated the process.
- 10Gb Ethernet may not yet be needed for many single workloads--especially in the volume server world. But as a pipe for an aggregated group of virtual machines? It's not mainstream yet, but it's clearly an early use case for high-bandwidth networking on x86.
- Finally, observe that even performance claims are couched in virtualization terms. Sure, this is partly about using virtualization to lend a little dazzle to what might otherwise be taken as a just-another-server announcement. But the fact remains that system performance running a mix of workloads is increasingly a more important metric than how fast a system runs a single database application.
Enough proof that server virtualization is starting to change everything (or at least an awful lot) about the data center?
Sun's not the only vendor busily acquiring this morning.
Dell has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MessageOne, Inc., an industry leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enabled enterprise-class e-mail business continuity, compliance, archiving and disaster recovery services. The acquisition, for approximately $155 million in cash, has been approved by the board of directors of each company and is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
One angle here is that Dell is a very changed company. They're no longer just about selling the cheapest boxes. They've expanded their processor portfolio, they've dipped a toe into retail, they've unveiled a more-than-decent new blade lineup, and they acquired iSCSI storage vendor EqualLogic. Now they're apparently expanding into the email continuity and archiving business. The Dell of today is a much changed company from the one of a couple of years back.
However, the acquisition also offers a window into what could potentially be a much bigger story for system vendors.
If we posit that "Cloud Computing" is the next big thing. That software services will be delivered over the network rather than from an on-site datacenter. That software vendors and service providers, rather than end-users, will increasingly consume server hardware. Such a state has huge implications for IT vendors. In the extreme, perhaps the largest providers of such services (can you say Google?) will even effectively become the systems companies in this new landscape.
However, even if we don't posit anything so extreme--at least for any reasonable planning horizon--it's still reasonable to ask a question: "Shouldn't system vendors be looking at ways to themselves deliver the software and services that users need over the network?" The alternative, it seems, is to cede considerable control to service providers who are as likely to build their own white boxes as to pay a premium for any Tier One vendor's gear.
Perhaps Dell is starting to think along those lines. Which would be a smart move on their part.
Dell 1.0 was a religious company. I suppose you could refer to it instead as merely an intense focus on low costs in all matters of its operations, but it really went deeper than that. Low cost was an article of faith that was the deep guiding principle underlying essentially everything that the company did. Dell didn't merely tilt toward a streamlined supply chain and lean R&D, they were a fundamental part of what it was as a company.
This is not a pedantic distinction. Focus can be adjusted and tweaked; it's that much harder to change your core. Yet that's what Dell had to do. It had to respond to a world where "cheap boxes" was no longer the guiding mantra for server buyers, which made Michael Dell's public pronouncements suggesting that "Dell 2.0" was mostly about better execution so wrongheaded. ... Read more
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