The effect that the emergence of ‘eight core’ processors will have on the virtualisation sector cannot be understated according to several experts. It’s the opinion of Julian Box, managing director of VirtualizeIT, for one. He stated that, “What’s going to drive the market, particularly the high end server market, over the next 18 months is how consolidation ratios are going to go quite a bit up with the eight core processors when they come out at the end of this year or the beginning of 2010.
“Rather than six cores, which are the most you can get at the moment; architecturally it will make a massive difference. The ratios of how many virtual machines you can get on to a host are going to increase quite substantially.”
Backing up this opinion, Rowan O’Donoghue, director of innovation and development with Origina pointed towards the recent IBM announcement of its plans for the release of its POWER 7 RISC processor in the second half of 2010 as being a big influence on the direction of virtualisation technology in the near future.
“Given the questions circulating the market at the moment about the continued survival of Sun Microsystems after the Oracle takeover, these may be the last major RISC platform on the market. Building on the power upgrades, the new processors will have eight cores, with a performance increase in each core. To sweeten the deal, the new processors will be backward compatible, meaning that existing customers with p575 and p595 (high performance cluster nodes) will be able to upgrade to the new processors just by swapping out the processor books and power modules.”
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