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.
