Data Center Virtualization Advances Cheap Chips
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The market for servers is recovering, but not for expensive servers running expensive processors. According to Forbes, that's in part thanks to virtualization. Companies such as virtualization software specialist VMware are pushing the technology into more and more machines that has cheap servers doing technological grunt work.
"By contrast, if a company is running its accounting system on a multi-processor server built around, say, RISC chips such as Oracle's UltraSparc T2 processors, the company is probably more worried about reliability and the ability to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time (geeks call it throughput), rather than soaking up every bit of the machine's capacity all the time.
"So why not consolidate the tasks tackled by lots of cheap x86 servers on one big server running Itanium or RISC processors with lots of throughput? Analysts say this is possible, but you take a performance hit when you run software designed for x86 processors on another processor design. 'It's primarily an x86 thing,' Dean McCarron, founder and principal of Mercury Research, says of virtualization."
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