IBM urges virtualization for datacenters

Virtualization, SOA, and cloud computing are keys to accommodating the anticipated growth of datacenters in an energy-conscious environment, an IBM official stressed Monday.

In a keynote presentation and subsequent interview at the Share conference in San Jose, Calif., Helene Armitage, vice president of systems software development in the IBM systems and technology group, emphasized substantial growth projections for datacenters. She also noted concerns about whether the power grid can handle this growth. Industries such as medical imaging and financial services are experiencing rapid growth, Armitage said.

"Thirty percent of the world's storage in the next two years is going to be these medical images," she said. Meanwhile, there are 5 billion messages occurring in the financial trading realm each day with the number projected to grow to the 130 billion per day in the next two years, she said.

Adding to the situation, storage capacity in datacenters is doubling every 18 months.

Datacenters will be spending as much on energy as they do on hardware, said Armitage. Based on the current trajectory, 10 new power plants would be needed in the United States in the next few years to accommodate growth, she said.

[ For more tips on conserving energy in the datacenter, see "The three principles of datacenter energy efficiency." ]

A conference attendee said the presentation was on the mark in terms of global energy initiatives. "I was rather surprised in terms of some of the numbers that datacenters were using in terms of energy," said the attendee, Mark Potter, vice president of corporate information security at Wachovia Small Business Capital.

IT users next year will spend $200 billion on systems such as interconnects, networking, SANs, fabrics, switches, and enterprise routers, up from $30 billion a few years ago, said Armitage. "All of this requires us to take a new approach," she said.

Datacenters were not designed to handle current growth levels, she said. "I really think where we are headed is to create true architectures for our datacenters," Armitage said.

She advocated virtualization coupled with SOA, citing IBM's experience. Cloud computing also factors into IBM's strategy.

"We've been virtualizing on the mainframe for 35 years. We're just talking about bringing that out into all the other environments as well," she said.

IBM has reduced downtime at Japan Airlines, for example, by using virtualization, said Armitage. Nationwide Insurance is on track to save more than $15 million during a three-year period with virtualization, she added. The company was moved from 250 individual Linux servers to two IBM z/9 mainframes. Volkswagen went from 76 individual Linux servers down to six, according to Armitage.

"Virtualization changes everything," she said. But it does bring additional complexity, said Armitage.