…speed and focused their attention on multiple processing cores and getting more work done in each tick of a chip's clock.
Instead, said Prince, customers are asking: "How does this fit into my virtual environment? What's my management look like?" Thus, Dell is leading a lot of marketing with virtualisation, which allows a single physical computer to house many independent operating systems, called virtual machines. Dell had expected Microsoft and various Linux players to challenge virtualisation expert and EMC subsidiary VMware, but it has withstood the competition so far, he said.
Dell itself has about 6,000 VMware-hosted virtual machines running on about 620 real systems in its own computing infrastructure, but this is only a small fraction of the 12,000 physical servers in total the company has. Some physical machines house as many as 20 virtual systems, but for business-critical tasks, Dell puts 10 virtual machines on a physical server, Prince said.
In Dell's analysis, using virtual machines saved $60m in capital equipment expenses, he said. But virtualisation also poses problems — including the virtual equivalent of server sprawl, in which new servers are added to a company's infrastructure faster than administrators can keep up.
"You can deploy new servers in hours instead of weeks. The downside is that you crank them out, so you have this proliferation of resources," Prince said. And virtual machines do not come with handy tracking technology. "The reason it's hard to get rid of them is it's hard to track them. There's no asset tag. There's no depreciation on a virtual server," he said.
Hardware still matters
Although sales have moved to a higher level, hardware details still matter, Prince said. One he's most excited about is solid-state drives (SSDs), which use Flash memory rather than the spinning platters of conventional hard disks.
Today, many SSDs directly replace hard disks, using the same size and Sata or SAS communication protocols to connect to a machine in a way that makes them interchangeable with conventional hard disks. But Prince is more interested in a technology that bypasses this older technology in favour of a more direct connection over a computer's PCI Express subsystem.
Companies including Fusion-io and Texas Memory Systems supply the technology, and Prince is among those in the server realm who like the idea. "You can get a massive performance upgrade in terms of IOPS [input-output operations per second]," he said.
Prince is also a believer in a technology called wear leveling, which moves data around the physical storage device so that no elements get overused or worn out. "The life has to be better than enterprise-class drives," he said.
He also predicted the eventual triumph of Ethernet over more special-purpose, high-speed network fabrics, such as Fibre Channel and InfiniBand. Fibre Channel will reach 16Gbps and probably will not move beyond 40Gbps, but Ethernet is headed for 40Gbps and 100Gbps today, with 400Gbps and even 1Tbps on the horizon, he said.
"Everybody is converging on Ethernet as the high-performance fabric of the future," said Prince.
