Virtualization brings the potential to deliver dramatic savings in terms of server count, footprint, power consumption and cooling requirements for data centers. For all its advantages though, virtualization also brings some unique challenges:
- Overall power consumption will be lower, but highly variable.
- There will be fewer servers, but each one will be more critical than ever.
- Applications can be dynamically reallocated at will, but the support infrastructure cannot do the same.
- The data center footprint will be smaller, but overall efficiency might still be suboptimal.
The good news is that there are practical and affordable ways to address these challenges and improve data center efficiency in the process.
This paper from Eaton [1] in the Data Center Knowledge White Paper Library looks at some of the power-related challenges and technologies that can address them.
Kevin Normandeau, is a veteran of the technology publishing industry having worked at a variety of technology sites including PC World; AOL Computing; Network World; Geek.com and International Data Group (IDG). Kevin lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two sons. When he is not in front of the computer (which is most of the time) he likes to get out to ski, hike and mountain bike.
Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com
URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/21/the-challenges-of-data-center-virtualization/
URLs in this post:
[1] This paper from Eaton: http://whitepapers.datacenterknowledge.com/whitepaper4947/
[2] Kevin Normandeau: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/knormandeau/
Click here to print.
