Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Link here – good visualisation about 10mins in of how their new Chicago data centre is laid out internally.

With virtualisation breaking the traditional hardware/OS ties; this is becoming an increasingly appealing way of managing commodity compute grid resources for large organisations. Mike makes some good points about the de-comissioning of servers on a large scale where you are adding 10′s of thousands on a regular basis – you need to take them out at some point too, and that’s time consuming. at this scale of operation It’s more efficient to make the the container and/or datacentre the field replaceable unit (as I discussed a while back) in this scenario.

Also interesting point that water consumption may be the next environmental touch paper for legislation and disclosure for IT shops.