Before you think of being a do-gooder...

[James Knott]

Christopher Browne wrote:
> On 5/29/06, James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> Evan Leibovitch wrote:
>> > Contrast this to the tech fashion inflicted by vendors, such as the
>> > current geekism-du-jour, virtualization. This is a creation of vendors
>> > to address a problem that doesn't exist for most people -- yet
>> > Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat seem to agree that we need it. Most
>> > businesses can't keep *one*  OS under control, now vendors are telling
>> > them they need to run multiple environments PLUS the supervisor system
>> > that runs it all.
>>
>> One point that IBM made, at the recent Real World Linux conference was
>> the idea of running multiple instances of Linux on a large system.  That
>> method delivers a lot of economies to someone running multiple servers,
>> compared to a bunch of x86 boxes. An example is a virtual lan between
>> virtual servers, that runs at memory speed, rather than "only" 1 or 10 
>> Gb/s.
> 
> The trouble is that there are some not inconsiderable diseconomies of
> scale, as well.
> 
> In order to host that bunch of hosts on one physical box, you need to
> have a physical box that has a Lot of Gigabytes of Memory, and those
> machines are *way* more expensive than beige boxes.
> 
> The only way there's an "economy of scale" here is if you can treat a
> $100K server as being a sunk cost that, in effect, comes as no cost.

One example is electricity and cooling costs.  A mainframe running many 
instances of Linux, consumes far less power than the equivalent CPU 
power in small boxes.  There is also the CPU load of several servers not 
peaking at the same time, to bring average load closer to peak, system 
reliability etc.

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