Page 76 - 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

on each core—that is, it executes two separate sequences of
instructions, a trick that was formerly reserved for server chip
designs, not those produced for “personal computing.” This
is another reason that virtualization is thriving on the x86 ar-
chitecture. Virtualization plus x86 has become a cloud builder
and a driver of the cloud’s extraordinary economies of scale.

But there’s a discrepancy to explain. The discussion with
Harr concerned individual end users and their virtual machine
needs. What if the customer of the cloud service is a business,
and it’s running a business application? That’s a bigger task,
because many end users use a business application at the same
time, so there’s a higher demand for CPU cycles.
Skilled implementers in cloud data centers are already

running 10 to 12 business applications on one server in virtual
machines. So virtualization of business applications has the
effect of consolidating what used to require 10 to 12 physical
servers into 1. But server experts say that the now current gen-
eration of servers based on faster chips, such as Intel’s Ne-
halem (Xeon 5500), will also double this number. In fact,
many believe that it will be common for a standard x86 server
to host 30 virtual machines, each running a business applica-
tion, by the end of 2010.

Highly skilled virtualization implementers, such as Accen-
ture, which manages enterprise IT on an outsourced basis,
already run 60 virtual machines (VMs) per server through
the techniques they’ve learned, which include offloading the
server’s virtual machine I/O to the network. Accenture has
successfully tested 100 VMs per server on its existing genera-
tion of hardware. As it refreshes its data center, it could be pos-

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