Friday, October 20, 2006

Data Center Evolution

Over the last 40 years, the data center has gone through a tremendous evolution. From mainframe to distributed computing, the challenges have remained the same: Manage complexity, reduce operational expenses, optimize utilization of assets and make the business and its employees more productive and flexible. Telecommunications, like no other industry, has been a key driver in this evolution. For many years, Sun has been working with our customers to deliver data center consolidation products and services. These are organized around server, storage, network and application consolidation.

Sun recently announced that the UltraSparc T1-based servers will be able to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. This is significantly changing the way data center will be run in the near future. Vendors like VMware have also been working hard at virtualizing data centers and desktops. Sun's Solaris 10 already is an option for running on VMware, and the Sun Blade 8000 will be certified to run VMware ESX Server 3.0.1. With Xen, though, multi-OS virtualization will essentially be built into Solaris.