Today's Trend: Server Consolidation

The trend today in the first decade of the new millennium is to move to server consolidation. This shift towards consolidating all of the computing functionality into one place is motivated by a need to reduce the complexity of the IT infrastructure, which by now could have several different servers, each handling unique applications. Reducing the physical distribution of the machines before consolidation also makes the system easier to manage.

Imposing standards on different, relatively standalone desktop PCs simply could not match the inherent efficiency in having computing power administered from a single physical access point. Today, many companies are looking at how to consolidate applications distributed across many servers onto one single machine. This is the reason IBM put Linux^[12] on a mainframe: to attempt to consolidate all Linux applications onto a single server and to get better utilization out of its mainframe installed base.

^[12] Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

This drive to consolidate points to the fact that all computing is becoming more a utility; instead of granting users even more powerful asset control (more expensive desktop PCs), organizations are trying to get users to draw their data and in some cases, applications, from a central server only when needed. New features in high-end servers and operating systems will eventually partition a very large server so that applications can run on different operating systems on the same machine. Now we are starting to approach the central “computing generator” of an information utility.

Future HP servers like today's HP Superdome, with its cell structure, will run a specific operating system and its applications within an individual partition. Partitioning allows you to divide up the machine's computing system so that a single machine can run as two or more machines. Rather than having a bunch of physical machines to divide up the work done on different operating systems and applications, all of the work can be done on one machine. For example, if you have 32 processors, you can allocate 16 to run UNIX,^[13] 8 to run Windows, and the rest to run Linux. This can make system usage very efficient.

^[13] UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.