New Hardware and Virtualization

AMD announced new product Opteron 6000 with eight and twelve-core x86 processors earlier this weekend (link http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20100329/bs_nf/72455 ). Here is one of the major advantages of the new platform, it provides 119% better performance over AMD’s last generation server chips without losing processing power and the price will stay just about the same. Just like many times in the past, both Intel and AMD are improving their products very rapidly. The new platform is designed to replace older platform products by AMD.
The importance of this announcement is what Dan talked about in our class, one of the major trends in IT, virtualization. The concept of virtualization comes from unused computing power of physical servers. Space and power usage are two other important factors in virtualization push. The growth of the Information Technology requires more servers to host applications and processes. Modern data centers are filled with tens of thousands of servers and space for servers are hard come by and expensive to maintain. The costs of cool a data center require lots of power day and night. It is one of the major expenses in operating data centers. I attended a Microsoft webcast last month about their new Visual Studio 2010 preview. One of the topic in the webcast was about cloud computing and virtualization (here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3b5Ca6lzqE ). The presenter showed a Microsoft data center in Chicago. Microsoft used truck load to put new servers in their data center and tried to save cooling power costs by opening roof of the data center.
My experience in the IT field told me that applications within an organization will alive until the last user leaves that organization. No one will voluntarily give up his/her applications unless forced to and will give you ten thousand reasons why the application should live for another day. For this very reason, you will see tens of thousands of servers are dedicated for legacy applications. DOS (for those who still remember) applications are still common in many organizations. What virtualization comes to play is to consolidate many of the old servers that are still needed to run applications together, but they won’t require too much processing powers. I don’t have the proof, but I would image a new AMD Opteron 6000 will probably have more processing power than 100 Intel Pentium I processors ten years ago. Other service providers will also benefit from AMD’s new product. They will be able to provide more services to the clients with less space and less power consumption.