[geeks] Need geek assistance

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2010, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:

> So you think that Servers will be workstation boards in a server case?

I think most Servers will be VMs running on blades.  What's left will be
traditional Servers with huge I/O and huge memory to run similar
virtualization stuff (or big pigs like Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft).

> While I basically agree with what you say about blade and VM
> efficiencies, I think that the computational needs of most companies are
> too small.

Not at all!

Plenty of companies run all sorts of in-house critical services (mail,
DNS, "intranet" web site, etc.) on cannibalized desktops.  There's plenty
of market room for someone to release very-small blade systems with 3 or 4
blades and a shared connection to the network and storage.  A hypervisor
gets you most of the administrative separation provided by separate
computers, and you can have 3 or 4 fully-utilized blades instead of 9
mostly-idle computers.

> The majority of the machines may be bought by large companies that will
> want blades, but the market of businesses who are too small is still a
> tremendously large market.

Once you sell the admin on consolidation without abdicating administrative
separation plus the ability to beta-test the next release of your software
on the actual hardware (instead of someone's retired desktop), there's
very little "too small" left.

Whether you go with running it on blades or on big Servers is, indeed, a
matter of scale, but the quirky product segment of small servers we saw
crop up in the days of the Bubble has nearly run its course.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't
Elgin, TX         (   need them, and the bad people don't follow them,
USA                )  so what good are they?"          --Ammon Hennacy