09.13.05
Scaling up data center
Enterprise data center is very interesting space with many consolidations. I see several trends here: commoditization, management and network/server/storage consolidation.Let me cover commoditization first on this thread…
In the early stage of commodity scaling, roughly 80% of the cost saving comes from hardware replacement from expensive UNIX (namely SUN and AIX) box to cheap LINUX. This move not only replaces expensive hardware from system vendors like SUN and IBM with cheap whitebox hardware, but also reduces the annual maintenance cost required from these vendors.
Once an enterprise has many LINUX-power servers inside its data center, the next easy task is about scaling out. Scaling out in many ways is about building a server farm and breaking a traditional task down so that many independent slice of a task can be run in parallel on many different cheap commodity servers at the same time. This is great for tasks like compilation, CAD simulation etc, but not so great for high end application that requires interlocking state management, memory sharing, or thread dependency.
Scaling up takes it a step higher: build a n-way SMP machines out of cheap commodity Linux box. There are quite a few companies out there and I think it is a very cool space because of the large high end computer dependency in several vertical industries such as financial services, insurance and telecommunication.
Here are a few software players come to my mind, let me know what you see:
- ScaleMP: funded by Sequoia Capital, LightSpeed Venture Partners and TL Ventures
- VirtualIron (used to be called Katana Technology): funded by Matrix, Highland, Goldman Sachs Ventures
- Cassatt: funded by Hewlett-Packard, Quatris Fund, Warburg Pincus
