Nick Kirsch

In 1998, a little-known company called VMware had just opened the doors of its Palo Alto office. Ever since computing moved from the mainframe to the desktop, the push had been bigger, faster, and more - more CPUs, more servers, more power, more cooling - and ultimately more complexity, more cost, and more waste. In the early 2000s, studies found that average utilization of CPUs across both data center and desktop was a meager 15 percent. If someone had predicted then that the Intel and AMD roadmaps would dramatically shift from increased clock speed to multiple processing units within a core (multi-core), they would have been thrown out - just as if they had predicted that major server vendors such as Dell, HP, and IBM would be actively promoting tools and services that allow customers to buy less of their product today. These vendors don't have a choice - IT orga... (more)