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Save time and money using virtualisation to reduce the number of servers in your data centre
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Talkback
I listened with amazement to the talk on Virtualisation as if it's a new technology. Mainframes from the likes of IBM, ICL, Honeywell etc were doing this back in the early 70's. I was giving presentations with almost the same diagrams to describe virtual machine computer architecture in 1975. And yes we were emulating different hardware platforms on the same machine too (it was a common tool for transitioning from legacy systems). Then along came unix servers and people started to argue of the advantages of splitting the workload onto multiple servers to save costs. The latest thing now seems to be that the industry has rediscovered the mainframe!
What is it about the IT industry that each generation seems to believe that they have reinvented everything. Don't they get taught any history?
... completely agree this has been around for decades - I used to work with the same thing in the 80s too .... and not as if this technology went away and has returned, the key UNIX vendors particularly have retained their own versions of these mainframe concepts ever since (with only VMS perhaps really excelling in the field - only to become the betamax of virtualised solutions).
What has changed though is two key things:
Firstly, we are seeing true OS/vendor independance, which has been sorely needed with the increasing realisation of the benefits of employing an open platform.
Secondly, and perhaps most reflected in the market, is the ability to virtualise the wintel platform (perhaps unfortunately, the dominant environment in the data centre today). This can be seen not only in the softer virtualisation techniques (such as with VMware, as discussed here) but also - and more revolutionarily - in the ability to virtualise environments at a hardware level (such as with Egenera, Fabric7, Panta, Liquid Computing, etc)
... This is where we really start to see a reprisal of the better features of the mainframe days but, importantly, without the major downsides (perhaps cost being the most significant).