VMTN Blog

Link: GigaOM Interview: Dr. Mendel Roseblum, Chief Scientist, VMware

Let’s talk about the data center for a minute. Do you think the whole architecture of the data center needs rethinking?

We went down a rat hole on how we built the data centers. I am not surprised with all the problems we are having with data centers. In my opinion, the architecture has problems because it was built with inferior solutions. What you had was people placing services on servers in a way that led to lightly loaded machines that were idle most of the time. The whole thing was built for peak performance (and not maximum utilization.) Well, idle machines use as much energy as fully utilized machines. The way out of this is to put more on the machines, and get them to be more efficient and take on the work load that will, to some extent, lower the power consumption.

I wrote about pizza boxes becoming a problem, mostly due to low utilization and higher power consumption. It kind of ties in with your thesis.

You have to see them not as boxes but as resources. People are now beginning to utilize virtualization and federate these pizza-box servers. I think if you start to view them as one unit, you can get more utilization out of them. I think in coming months you are going to see a big push to make all servers (and other hardware) inside a data center look more like a single unit. Ironically, if you look at the future — low-end pizza box servers with multicore CPUs running our software — you will start to see the big machine we were building where we got started.