Blade Watch

An interesting read talking about x86 being appropriate for specific mission critical applications or services, do check it out.

We need to focus on the positives, discuss the benefits and how we can make it work for our organization – would we use x86 virtual platform a front office retail function, possibly not, but for that market data platform it might be equally ideal.

Choosing the right platform for the business function will always be a challenge, we’ve made big progress in the virtualization platform space recently and long may it continue, addressing specific business and user requirements, at the same time, we need to move towards more standards, configuration and best practice models – remind the user community that the virtual platform needs secured as you would the Windows/Linux installation on the virtual machine.

There’s an interesting thing happening in many respects, like the car industry, we’re erasing the middle ground long term, moving towards either the industrial strength or the the super cheap, disposable short term platform which suits us now and maybe for the next two years when I’ll bin it and replace it. This in terms of energy efficiency, data center and the hardware support costs. Is the 1u or 3u server, the blade combined with grid and virtualization the next generation supercomputer or Enterprise platform?

There will always be demand for the industrial strength ‘Non-Stop’ high end solutions, the last forever ones, for those specific government or tier 1 market applications, but I wonder as the x86 platform develops, as what we can achieve with it in partnership with virtualization and grid, if that can’t equally fulfill a similar role at reduced cost?

Is it industrial strength I need or something that works most of the time when I need it? How much downtime can i accept and in a virtual world with fail-over, with load balancing is it always online or just many cheapy computers that can share the load, manage end user expectations and service?

What investment to risk ratio is acceptable to my business, my customers? For those free services will the end users care (or notice) if the system is ‘down’? We need to define the difference between it being ’slow’ (which we could suggest is client/web based) and the unavailable state, the site/application displaying the ’sorry we’re broken page’.

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