I had a look at the ebay prototype and it was, well, less than moving. What they they is a fibre cable going into a switch, then dozens of cables going to dozens of web serves in intel boxes in racks, then dozens of cables going to a switch to a single fibre to a data base server.
So, with web server consolidation, these dozens of servers get put under VM and the dozens x 2 cables and a switch get replaced by OSA cards and/or hipersockets. Voila, less floor space, less power, less manpower to maintain, less cost of total ownership and maintenance. All true, no question in my mind. What happens then? You still have dozens of copies of Linux running in dozens of EC machines. And they're talking to each other via TCP/IP stacks over a number of high speed connections. Have you really advanced the architecture and capabilities of Linux? So my question is: What moves are afoot to reduce the number of required images by consolidating their functions and remove the TCP/IP communications between applications? Isn't this the next logical step? (On the backend, database side, one or a few large DB servers seem to be able to handle the actual DB workload). ===== Jim Sibley Implementor of Linux on zSeries in the beautiful Silicon Valley "Computer are useless.They can only give answers." Pablo Picasso __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
