\nLast week I was talking to a customer. He has a big problem.<\/p>\n
The topic of the meeting has been consolidating, and benefitting from Oracle’s licensing w.r.t. Sun. So far, the meeting went well, and then, during a small break, customer described his problem and asked for solutions to the following:<\/p>\n
In his datacenter and under the desks in the offices, he often finds (and: Don’t we all do that?) small systems, running for years, some even decades, and doing real important stuff. These systems have never been part of the “real” datacenter, but still, can not be replaced, because they are vital parts of the overall environment.<\/p>\n
Now, he faces the following problem:<\/p>\n
These systems, as stated, are old, some are still Intel x386 boxes (mostly running Linux apps!). These systems are not fully loaded, but seem to run at some 20-30% usage (which we all know, is average, even today!). So, replacing these systems one-by-one with current boxes will not really yield a better CPU\/performance ratio, because then these new systems would be used in the below 1% range. That’s a waste of resources, regardless of the fact, that such systems do cost way below 1000$ today.<\/p>\n
So, he is looking for solutions to consolidate these systems, and have a proper way of doing accounting on the different workloads put onto these systems.<\/p>\n
I simply stated, that we can do that, and he agreed to have a different meeting later this summer. Still, I’d like to outline, what we will be proposing:
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