Last week, the first part this video series focused on the energy efficiency benefits of 45nm. The 2nd part of this video (below) is focused on the benefits of 45nm for virtualization and the intel processor roadmap including what's next in 45nm processor technology - the Dunnington and Nehalem-EP products

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Chris

Part four of three

Hopefully if you are watching this, you have already seen the first three installments I did on surviving data center crisis. A quick recap, the premise ( aka crisis ) is, You are running out of capacity.

According to Green Tech World, TMC 2007 "81% of IT mgrs will exceed capacity for power or space in the next 5 years".

In the first three video segments I spoke to three complementary approaches, that taken together could give you as much as 50X the data center capacity in your existing power and space .

Summarizing:

Data Center Crisis - How to Survive... Refresh with todays advanced high performing servers
Data Center Crisis - Part 2 - Using Virtualization... Virtualize and Consolidate
Data Center Crisis - Part 3 - Getting Dense- Use every Watt

Today I want to address two follow-up questions:

One, Where to go next when I used up all this new capacity?
Two, Who can help me get there?

The answers, it turns out, are related.

Moving outside the box is the 4^th^ strategy, and like the other strategies, it can be used anytime, in complement with the other three strategies.

Step to outside the boxness:

Moving outside the box allows it manager to move work that can be efficiently run elsewhere ( things like email ) outside the data center, and focus on the highest business value or least movable work inside.

As to who can help you get here. The system integrator/IT Outsourcer community offers support in all four strategies I have outlined.

My recommendation is to examine your situation, and your growth projection, and create a plan using all four strategies that will preclude the major capital expense of data center construction. Avoiding that 10 to 50 million dollar capital hit should be a very compelling proposal.

InfoWorld recently published some pretty scary data on the data center crunch: exerpt: "Forty-two percent of the respondents said their datacenters would exceed power capacity within 12 to 24 months unless they carried out expansion. Another 23 percent said it would take 24 to 60 months to run out of power capacity. The managers reported similar figures for cooling: 39 percent said they would exceed cooling capacity in 12 to 24 months, and 21 percent said it would take 24 to 60 months. "

I have done a series of blog entries on the topic: Almost Free Data Center Capacity and Big Numbers in the Data Center - The Data Tsunami

In these I have focused the solution ( or at least treatment) for data center pain on three strategies - Refresh, Virtualize, and Densification. I don't think I have used the word densification in a sentence before, but spell-check says it is real... For those who prefer a mixed media message, I agreed to record a series of short videos talking about the each approach and benefits for these strategies. Starting with the video on refresh.


The next two - virtualization and densification, will be posted soon.

Thanks for tuning in.

Data Center Innovation: Is Virtualization the latest hype or a key step forward in Data Center transformation?

Members of the technology development community, sometimes take the press at face value. In other cases, we accept the press, new media and old, for what they are, journalists. Journalists ultimately commissioned to sell eyeballs and provoke "cocktail chatter" over their brilliant prose. The question that it has always left upon me, as a member of this community of technology developers, do they really understand what we do? Do they understand or even care about the countless hours required to think of the next great technological innovation, determine the markets for its application, build an ecosystem to sustain, and continue to innovate in the face of dwindling profits and increasing competition. Clayton Christenson calls this the "Innovator's Dilemma"....though I am not sure he has ever felt the "sting" of the dilemma....better to write the story then live through it I suppose.

Virtualization has become the latest "grist" for the technology journalist "mill". VMWare, a 7-year "overnight" success story, led by the engineering team of Mendel Rosenblum, Steve Herrod and their "Captain" Diane Greene, has captured the industry's imagination and begun to transform Data Centers around the world. This team has innovated for years behind a simple premise to enable x86 servers to be logically replicated as much as and as many times as the compute cycles will allow. Many have argued they are replicating innovation that's been done on mainframes for years and to a certain extent,...they are right. Does that make the technology advances in hypervisor development and Data Center efficiency LESS innovative? No, in my opinion, innovation is different from pioneering. The current wave of Virtualization innovators, (VMWare, Virtual Iron, SWSoft, Novell, Oracle, Sun, Microsoft, 3Leaf Systems, Citrix, etc.) owe a strong legacy to pioneers of the Atlas Project in 1961 and IBM for innovating "time sharing" and resource pooling concepts over 40 years ago. However, their innovation have exceeded far beyond the basic concepts of "logical partitioning" of compute processes to include virtual machine motioning from a single physical server to another, resource scheduling and log file innovation for higher availability and the ability to be operating system "lite" for rapid application deployment. These innovations are reducing Data Center costs as much as 50-70% in some cases. What is compelling is that these new group of innovators are transforming the traditional client/server software development models for both IT enterprises and independent software vendors.

At Intel, we spend a great deal of our time developing silicon innovations in virtualization and we are once again pushing the "innovation paradigm" by extending virtualization innovation to chipset, networking and I/O technologies. Server Platform Virtualization (processor, chipset and I/O virtualization) has benefits for the industry, software developers and individual IT managers. For the industry, it facilitates a discussion between Intel and our competitors to drive the standards and best practices discussion to deliver virtualization capabilities with meaningful impact, such as the work we are doing with PCI-SIG around I/O virtualization. For software developers Server Platform Virtualization provides opportunities for innovation and new usage models for graphics virtualization, business continuity and storage management. The IT manager realizes all of these benefits by enjoying a reduced cost deployment infrastructure, ease of use in integrated management tools and increased efficiency on power requirements. Enough benefit, enough innovation to keep the "hype machine" alive and for good reason.

What does this mean? In my opinion, Virtualization is BOTH the latest hype machine for the industry and the 1^st^ meaningful step towards Data Center innovation in a decade. The combination of virtualization technology, multi-core energy efficient processors technologies and 10GB+ networking infrastructure will transform the way we view Data Centers, both physically and logically over the next 5 years. Beyond 2012, innovators will still face "our dilemma", journalists will find the next article to write/hype and the pioneers will (hopefully) be debating the initial findings of their 1^st^ personal quantum computer, and many of us will be determining how to incorporate yet another key innovation into our lives in the Data Center.

For a popular history of virtualization:

http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/virtualization/

For the less popular version and TCO calculator:

http://www.vmware.com/overview/history.html

For additional Intel resources:

http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/virtualization/