"Part 4 of 6 "Virtualization Technology and Ecosystem Support"
Earlier this summer we announced Intel's soon to be released Intel Xeon server product code named "Nehalem-EX" to the world. This is a breath-taking architecture that our engineers have been developing for several years. The performance improvements of this new platform are truly incredible. We really are looking forward to providing the industry with the specifics....
However, the performance, the instrumentation and many of the features of this platform would not be available if not for a broad ecosystem (read village) of community support. I was able to get a sneak peek today of some of our reliability features in Nehalem-EX and cannot wait for the public to see these capabilities. The power management capabilities are capable of delivering huge ROI savings for consolidation of virtualized and non-virtual workloads. The memory capability up to 512GB is staggering. Does anyone remember when 512GB of Storage was considered impressive??
One of the most rewarding aspects of these hardware capabilities is the ability of the virtualization industry to innovate software solutions for the data center around these new capabilities with technologies like SR-IOV, Machine-Check architectures and Dynamic Resource pooling. Without the help of VMWare, Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat and Xen-community users would struggle to take advantage of these features in a real-tme automated deployment model.
Beyond server this virtualization ecosystem is innovating client virtualization technologies, application virtualization and rapid application deployment models that are allowing for the ubiquity of virtualization technologies to permeate many different device form factors from the Data Center to the Desktop. This is compelling, innovative and delivers a high degree of ROI.
At Intel, we have thousands of software developers who remind us everyday that it is sometimes easy to forget their contributions and those of their key ISV colleagues. In virtualization, we have not only come to appreciate them, we couldn't exist without them. In difficult financial and social times, it takes a village to build a viable, vibrant and innovative community. I personally look forward to catching up with all of my colleagues in virtualization at VMWorld and IDF (Intel's Developer Forum) over the next 45 days and thanking them for their wonderful committment to our joint efforts. It has been quite a ride so far and the best is.....is yet to be concieved.