The noon keynote on Tuesday at the Parallels Summit was delivered by Bernard Meyerson, VP of strategic alliances and CTO at IBM. His topic was the approaching crisis in IT power usage.
The bad news: Moore’s Law, computing hardware design, chip manufacturing, particle physics – some of that stuff is just a tiny bit over my head.
The good news: Meyerson is funny. And I can get behind that. More importantly, his premise doesn’t necessarily rely on your ability to understand the dilemmas faced by microchip manufacturers. It has a lot more to do with the simple issues of power and cooling faced by the people who operate data centers.
Part of that basic premise is that virtualization is driving data center development, in the sense that the bulk of innovation in increasing the potential for IT hardware to do work is taking place in the technology for virtualizing hardware, as opposed to increasing the power of hardware.
One of the interesting issues addressed in the presentation was the fact that major Internet success stories – something like YouTube, which ramped up from zero to something like 20 million users in the space of 18 months – are, in spite of their coolness, technically a “problem” for hosting services. And the cloud is, in a sense, the only reasonable reaction to those.
IBM has a cloud deployed, as you are probably aware. There was a significant chunk of the presentation that dealt with the IBM cloud’s development, and its deployment – some of the interesting ways in which it is being used.
A big part of Meyerson’s presentation is arguing the significance of the cloud, as a technology – whether it’s a separate enterprise deployment, or a large cloud that includes disparate data centers, like IBM’s (I’m afraid I lost track of the exact number, but IBM manages millions of square feet of distributed data center space).
In his opinion, cloud computing is really the only answer to some of the modern problems of hosting – including that power/hardware issue, and the ability of new projects to ramp up and require scale at an amazing rate.
Anyhow, overall an unexpectedly amusing and engaging presentation based in engineering. I was much less baffled than I anticipated.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
No related posts.
