Sunday, December 31, 2006
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
The Light Night Before Christmas
t was a quiet evening, for the most part. We had dinner, exchanged a few gifts, decked the ficus with a single string of lights (as we didn’t get a Christmas tree this year), and reminisced about Christmases past. When it was just the two of us together, Ponzi and I made a halfhearted attempt at exchanging gifts and whatnot - although most of her gifts are to be acquired after our honeymoon. I can only assume that everybody out there had a good night, too - merry and bright and all that jazz.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Virtual machines: the new ghetto in the data center
Virtualization is becoming a ghetto for some lines of business applications. Those server-based applications, each of which used to get its own dedicated hardware, are increasingly stacked like pancakes on a single machine. In some companies, applications that used to have their own homes are now housed in the IT equivalent of cheap tenements. In some cases 50 or more applications may reside on a single physical server. But with too many virtual machine tenants-in-residence, the underlying hardware foundation starts to crack. Performance degrades. The user experience begins to suffer.
It wasn't supposed to be that way. Management, troubled by server utilitization rates in the range of 10%, was delighted to discover virtualization as a way to get more out of existing hardware. Some organizations have begun cost saving initiatives that require all new applications to reside in virtual machines unless a business case can be made to break policy. Unfortunately, the temptation for some overzealous bean counters is to put too many applications on each physical server.
It used to be that every application would get its own physical server, and since hardware is cheap and powerful, users were ensured of snappy performance. Users had more power than they needed. Unfortunately, some organizations may be stepping back into a world more familiar to mainframe users in the '60s and '70s. In that era of timesharing, applications got a slice of the mainframe. Users often had to wait for their jobs to complete because a high volume of jobs was competing for scarce and very expensive hardware processing resources. Timesharing was a compromise, a way to allocate those precious MIPS.
Wintel servers made processing power cheap and plentiful, but the limitations of one application per physical server helped promote server sprawl.
Now for the first time IT can consolidate those compute resources and, at a very granular level, allocate them to more closely match each application's needs. While the cost of processing power has dropped, the move to virtualization has allowed management to dramatically throttle back the allocation of that processing power to each application in the name of cost savings. The irony is that, in a world where processing power is cheaper than ever, some users may find themselves waiting longer.
It wasn't supposed to be that way. Management, troubled by server utilitization rates in the range of 10%, was delighted to discover virtualization as a way to get more out of existing hardware. Some organizations have begun cost saving initiatives that require all new applications to reside in virtual machines unless a business case can be made to break policy. Unfortunately, the temptation for some overzealous bean counters is to put too many applications on each physical server.
It used to be that every application would get its own physical server, and since hardware is cheap and powerful, users were ensured of snappy performance. Users had more power than they needed. Unfortunately, some organizations may be stepping back into a world more familiar to mainframe users in the '60s and '70s. In that era of timesharing, applications got a slice of the mainframe. Users often had to wait for their jobs to complete because a high volume of jobs was competing for scarce and very expensive hardware processing resources. Timesharing was a compromise, a way to allocate those precious MIPS.
Wintel servers made processing power cheap and plentiful, but the limitations of one application per physical server helped promote server sprawl.
Now for the first time IT can consolidate those compute resources and, at a very granular level, allocate them to more closely match each application's needs. While the cost of processing power has dropped, the move to virtualization has allowed management to dramatically throttle back the allocation of that processing power to each application in the name of cost savings. The irony is that, in a world where processing power is cheaper than ever, some users may find themselves waiting longer.
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