Page 74 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

server. The number is a moving target; some 6-core CPUs are
now available, and the manufacturers are headed for 8 and 12
cores soon. The numbers won’t stop there.
VMware is the market leader in virtualization. In late 2009,
I asked VMware’s vice president of enterprise desktop market-
ing, Patrick Harr, how many active end users, each using her

own virtual machine, a core can support. On the latest gener-
ation of Intel processors, called Nehalem (Xeon 5500), or
AMD’s latest Opteron chips, the number has doubled to six-
teen per core, he said. A typical low-cost server has two CPUs,
each with four cores, for a total of eight cores. Such a machine
can support up to 128 end users, each in an individual virtual
machine that is able to use memory, CPU cycles, disk drive,

and input/output (I/O) on the network.
Another typical configuration for a low-cost server is four
CPUs occupying four sockets, with each CPU consisting of four
cores. To complete the math, the 16 cores on such a server are
capable of supporting 256 end users, each in his own virtual
machine. These are not high-end servers, but rather basic
building block servers, something like those described in
Chapter 2. These basic servers are likely to be heavily equipped
with memory and input/output devices, the network inter-

face devices that move network and storage data on and off
the computer, to support so many users, which in the end puts
them in a different class from “commodity.” But in other re-
spects, they resemble the most cost-effective hardware designs
on the market.
Google figured out how to build such plain vanilla cloud
servers ahead of the rest of the marketplace and thus launched

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