Cloud Computing
Gartner Data Center Conference 2008
Tuesday, December 02, 200808:09 pm EDT
The MGM Grand in Las Vegas is top-heavy this week with many of Gartner’s top research analysts converging for the annual Data Center Conference. The keynotes and breakouts cover the spectrum from green IT to the cloud. By far the most popular topic is virtualization. In the first presentation server virtualization was predicted to grow to touch up to 50% of all workloads by 2012.
According to Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman, in the past most of these workloads were for dev & test, but now up to 70% of virtualized workloads today are in production environments. In Bittman’s response to the question of whether databases could be virtualized, he noted that the concerns over I/O intensive loads can now be addressed with well-defined data paths, careful application/database design, and adherence to best practices.
From an xkoto perspective, we are seeing more customers moving their databases to VMs. Some of the database best practices that make this transition easier are the same rules that have governed good database design for years, like enforcing referential integrity with primary keys on each table, clustering table and index data together, separating logs from data, making full use of the database engine’s optimizer, and carefully tuning buffer pool sizing.
The steady march of server virtualization is moving from delivering consolidation to agililty to data center management across the stack. It is likely that most workloads including databases will by necessity end up being managed by virtualization technologies.
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Grid vs. Cloud Computing
Tuesday, September 02, 200809:53 am EDT
In Derrick Harris’ recent blog post, “Grid vs. Cloud vs. What Really Matters”, he makes some astute comments to de-hype some of the noise around cloud computing and grids. Recently I was speaking on yet another popular paradigm - virtualization - and I tried to demarcate where grids, clouds, and virtualization had their primary use cases and their boundaries. Sure enough, an IT vendor in the audience came up to me afterwards to assert that grid use cases went beyond the HPC fence I put around it. Fair comment, showing again that different models do overlap and more convergence is expected.
Case in point - Derrick also mentioned data virtualization vs. database virtualization…
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