The Process
It is no longer enough to simply buy servers. Why? Not because you can never have enough servers, or blades, or workstations; but because you can never have enough computing power! If you don't agree with this statement, you should stop reading the rest of this article, and go and do something more valuable with your time!
Management of compute-resources has become exponentially more challenging as the sheer number of resources is increasing and the complexity of these resources is becoming less transparent. Resources are becoming more complex as accelerator technologies such as GPU and FPGA becoming more prevalent and multi-core processors such as the IBM Cell are throwing a curved ball to the developers with the concept of heterogeneous multi-core processor.
From the business side of things, requirements keep coming in and demands are more complex; new Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, new response time requirement, and so forth. How did we get here? Where are we going from here and how can we get there? One thing is for sure and that is the fact that there is no "magic." It's a process and we have to go every step of this [5-step] process in order to come out on top. Assuming that "on top" of your game is where you want to be!
The Five Stages
What are these five stages that I am referring to?
- Chaos: Bunch of servers
- Organized Chaos: Management of servers; Grid Computing
- Uniformity: Focusing on performance; Cluster Computing
- Understanding: Focusing on scalability and business needs; Utility Computing
- Order: Seamlessness and adaptation; Cloud and Adaptive Computing
Read the Rest of this Article at Developer.com