Recently in Data Center Category

The news surrounding Intel's recent announcement of the Atom Z6xx (aka Moorestown) System-on-a-Chip (SoC) tends to focus on the uphill battle the company is facing in the ARM-centric smartphone ecosystem. Intel has claimed idle times of 21-23 milliwatts for the Z6xx series compared to 25 mW for a 1GHz Snapdragon. That is 10 days of standby time with a 1500 mAh battery. What is more interesting is the move to port Windows Server to multi-core ARM processors manufactured at 40 nm, such as announced by Marvell Technology Group. The chips will bring more than a five-fold reduction in power consumption in data centers and cloud environments compared to the x86. Think of the headroom an ARM implementation in servers would be when comparing an Intel Xeon at several hundred dollars versus a $35 ARM quad-core running virtualized Windows Server 2008. Om Malik brings up in a recent post that it was "too bad Intel sold its StrongARM technology to Marvell." I agree; Marvell did what Intel didn't have the heart to do. We think of virtualization in data centers as smart economics in hardware utilization and power consumption but what happens when server hardware processor cores decrease by a factor of 10 and power consumption by 5? Do we throw hardware at the problem again? Analysts should model the financial scenarios factoring in VMWare licensing costs, power consumption/footprint of rack space and application-specific-servers vs. general purpose power-hog blades running VMWare.

Beyond the hype around cloud computing and its variants, there is growing acceptance of the notion that the buying criteria of end customers has moved from a discussion of how the technology chosen and provided to a discussion of what value the technology is providing. This provides the new frame of reference for customers and IT providers alike.  We are finally getting to fully connect the business objectives and requirements with IT services delivery. Given IBM's announcement today of a new data center in Auckland and a Cloud Computing application research center in Hong Kong, there is growing evidence that organizations are increasingly more interested in moving much of their data center operations to off-premise providers. When we set aside details such as massively scalable processing, virtualization, service orientation and always-on access; we have nothing short of a major evolution of business itself. The key will be in pricing strategies of such services because smart IT shops can always reverse engineer your cost structure for standard cloud platform offerings as they consider the option of "private clouds" (a term I utterly detest). IBM references "private clouds" as those configurations where customers have dedicated computing and resources for their own business. They are compute and infrastructure technology stacks, nothing more magical than that. The provider profit margin and value will result from their ability to optimize everything behind the service boundary while hiding complexity from the end customer. That is something worth paying for!

With Cisco's acquisition of Tidal Software last week, the company continues to beef up its software portfolio beyond its core networking business. Tidal makes performance monitoring software for enterprise applications like Oracle and SAP that run in large data centers. While $105 million is not a big bet for Cisco, I see this as further convergence of computing and communications in both the enterprise data center and ultimately in the cloud. There is innovation at the core OS level to optimize performance for Intel's new Xeon 5500 processors. Microsoft Hyper-V, Sun Solaris and Red Hat Linux have been extended to enable performance and energy efficiency improvements available using Intel's extended page table memory access. This allows the hypervisor to bypasses kernel software codepaths altogether and map directly to virtual guest instances. Advanced memory management using Intel's QuickPath enables the ability to virtualize previously uncommon I/O workloads such as database & file serving. This is how we will see network layer virtualization evolve, reducing power consumption while creating efficient memory use along the way. All these features, combined with Cisco's California architecture, are coming together to disrupt the computing core. Moving up the data center management stack with tools such as Tidal makes a lot of sense for Cisco, because at the end of the day, the key will be application performance.