Green Isn't The Only Thing

I'm glad to see a conscious develop that more people are tuning into. The green environmental movements is a worthy effort and in line with the evolution of our civilization that it would be expected of us to eventually learn to recycle and harmonize with our major spaceship "Mother Earth".
 
Okay that is far as I need to take that. Yes, recent press releases from vendors like VMware and IBM are also on that bandwagon about how machine virtualization and server consolidation will reduce power and cooling costs, free up datacenter space, etc at costs of 50% or better. 

For example, at LinuxWorld Aug 2007 IBM announces its Big Green Linux initiative by wanting to also consolidate 3900 of its servers to 30 z series mainframes. Even for us, at BMC, we are also committed to virtualization on our servers and our products: http://www.bmc.com/products/products_services_detail/0,,0_0_48168368,00.html
 
However, for those that aren't motivated by "flower power", these vendors are on the right track in terms of TCO and controlling IT costs. It too is an evolution in datacenter management, and inevitable that more datacenters will utilize this technology in the future as it will very much be the mainstay of how IT is used.
 
How do I know this? Well for me, history is a guide. The mainframe evolved this way as well. It was not sufficient to just partition memory and a processor to run a task and then let it become idle until another task came about. It soon became apparent that higher utilizations of computing platforms as it relates to the expense to provide them challenged the vendors and customers to engineer capacity in a meaningful way. Ah, then the hardware eventually got cheaper due to Moore's law and everyone forgot about these early lessons. So I stand confident that as corporations look to lower the computing cost and other cost containment strategies that open technologies and virtualizations are not going to be periphery items, but instead mainstream. 
 
I will talk more about z/VM as it facilitates z/Linux on my next post, and yes, it too is a bit "leafy".