Page 75 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

VIRTUALIZATION C HANGES EVERYTHING

into manufacturing its own. Over the last two years, Dell has
expressed interest in supplying the needs of cloud builders
and has shown an understanding of what those special needs
would be.
The rapid expansion of the number of cores per CPU has
to some extent caught the traditional data center by surprise.

For many years, corporate data centers have usually been or-
ganized around a principle of one application on one server,
for ease of administration and avoidance of application con-
flicts. Where that’s still the case, many cores sit idle, as the ap-
plication’s needs are met by only one or two cores. AMD says it
will produce Opteron chips with 16 cores in 2012. What is to
be done with all those cores?

Virtualization’s hypervisor loves cores for their ability to
pour out CPU cycles. Host machines in the cloud are run-
ning multiple virtual machines that demand more and more
CPU cycles. Multiple-core servers and multiuser clouds: it’s a
match—if not one made in heaven, then at least one that was
previously difficult to achieve on the ground. Virtual machines
run in the cloud, and with the refreshing of server hardware
that’s currently under way, twice as many can run on inex-
pensive hardware. This process of being able to run more and

more virtual machines appears to be accelerating.
Circuits are still shrinking on the chips—Intel has started
fabricating chips with circuits that are 32 billionths of a meter
thick, which speeds performance. Clock speeds may not be
going up as fast as they used to, but increases in the number
of cores more than compensates. The most recent generation
of Intel x86 servers continuously runs two processes at a time

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