Should server blade vendors be concerned with the software applications their customers are delivering? Conventional wisdom says no - just design the hardware to maximize performance on traditional axes: maximum compute power and maximum IO between CPUs, memory, network, and storage. But often surprises are found after hardware is in the field because designers don't anticipate how their customers intend to use the product. Trying to simply maximize hardware performance across all data paths can fail to address the key bottlenecks and issues that manifest themselves with emerging, rapidly evolving cloud computing use cases.  Read more »

If analyst predictions that virtual servers will run nearly 50 percent of server workloads by next year comes true, data center managers must be equipped to manage the issues that accompany the benefits.
The key technological advance that makes cloud computing financially viable is server virtualization – the ability to run many virtual machines, each with its own resources, on a single, powerful host.
The benefits of virtualization are clear: Read more »

Last month’s EC2 outage at Amazon prompted a lot of scaremongering around cloud computing’s readiness for prime-time, and a lot of (justified) reflection on the merits of current cloud service-level agreements (SLAs). A network configuration change caused problems for EC2’s Northern Virginia data center, impacting availability of sites like Foursquare and Reddit. Other EC2 users, like Netflix, with backup server instances in other ‘availability zones’ were able to ride out the storm and continue to provide service. Read more »