Virtually Real and Really Virtual

Last week, IBM announced a new technology solution called the virtualization engine. VE, as it will undoubtedly get called, turns a real datacenter into a virtual datacenter. This is a really big deal. CEO’s, CIO’s, and CFO’s will surely like VE because virtual datacenters require fewer people, offer more reliability, and are much less costly to operate. Sounds good, but what is a datacenter and what is a virtual datacenter?

When you visit the web site of a company and click on something, a server in a datacenter somewhere gets the job of finding the web page or process you requested and delivering it to your browser over the Internet. A simple protocol called http (hyper text transfer protocol) describes exactly how the process works. With one user on the Internet and one server at the other end serving one web page it is quite trivial. With millions of users around the world visiting the web site at unpredictable times and making unpredictable requests for millions of documents, processes and transactions, it can become a nightmare for the people who are managing the datacenter. (read more)