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Credit Crunch Squeezing Data Center Space
miller60 writes "Many companies have saved money by leasing wholesale 'plug and play' data center space instead of building their own facilities. But the credit crunch has slowed the construction of new data centers, and analysts say this will create a shortage of data center space in 2010 in key markets like northern Virginia and Silicon Valley where demand exceeds supply. The situation is already becoming critical for companies with large space requirements, as indicated by a flurry of leasing recently in northern Virginia, where the remaining space may be quickly absorbed by government stimulus projects."
We tripled the number of servers and halved the space requirements by virtualizing as much as we could. The only things we couldn't put in a VM were stuff with specific HW requirements (like fax server boards and tape robots). Many large companies are just afraid or unaware of the capabilities of virtualization. The big software companies also aren't helping. For example, Oracle needs to get over it and figure out that many midsize companies don't need RAC for performance or 24/7 @ 99.999% - there are many, many businesses that really can tolerate an app being down for under an hour (or less) while the VM is brought up on a different physical box. The current Oracle license model completely fails in an environment where you want to run mulitple VMs on relatively cheap multicore, multiprocessor blades.