The other week I wrote about the impact of the poor economic situation and the scope for really quite disruptive change in the building blocks of IT infrastructure that might follow as the world gets ready to spring out of the doldrums. It looks as though the IT vendors are gearing up for that eventuality, as new possibilities for inclusion in future infrastructure services are now appearing. 

Here are two of the latest that caught my eye. They are aimed, at least in part, at grabbing a quick-fix step-function jump in capacity and capabilities once the economy turns upwards.  

The first is another contribution to the latest fashion of datacentres in a container, targeting the need for finding quick ways of getting capacity without some of the hassles of installing and commissioning significant systems upgrades. 

This one comes from HP, which has christened it the Performance Optimised Datacentre – or POD. In much the same was as IBM and its container offering, HP is aiming to meet customer needs rather than provide an alternative sales option for its own systems. Users can specify any systems they like, so long as they fit in a 19 inch rack. With a planned turn-round time of six weeks between order and delivery, and a maximum capacity of around 3,500 compute nodes, this is one approach that may well have some short-term attraction for users looking for a quick scalability fix. 

The second comes from hosting company, Bytemark and, although primarily designed as hosted services engine, looks like it could also be the basis of something a little more permanent, even for in-house datacentres.  

Hosted services are not only an obvious option for meeting the requirements of rapid scalability, but also an increasingly viable option as a permanent alternative to many-an onsite datacentre. This is particularly so as server performance and virtualisation technologies continue to improve. But at the other extreme there is also the possibility of exploiting large numbers of standardised, simple servers, particularly in the Linux-running marketplace – and this exploitation can make sense both for remote hosting businesses and in-house datacentre users. This is, after all, one of the selling points of IBM’s z/10 mainframe, which can turn itself into a thousand or more virtual Linux servers. 

Bytemark’s approach is radically different to the z/10, but the potential is very similar. By using Intel’s Atom processor rather than the Xeon or AMD Athlon, it has been able to offer a low cost (£45 rental per month), reasonably-performing server, with 2 GByte of memory and two 100 GByte disc drives. Best of all, the thing only consumes 25W of power, which is a good deal less than most other systems worthy of the `server’ title. 

This type of low-cost, low-power, reasonably-performing server has the ability to hit a sweetspot for a large number of users in the Linux systems marketplace. As well as IBM, this market has been noted by HP, where very large volumes of low-cost Linux servers can be managed by a single NonStop server. This maintains a high availability server state record for each Linux server – effectively a record of what task each is performing and what applications or tools are running. Should one of the servers fail its workload can be shifted to another and the failed system replaced with no down time and a minimum effective systems redundancy requirement. It has the potential to be cheap to run, standardised so cheap to buy, easy to manage and very scalable. All of these attributes, and the latter in particular, are going to be important capabilities when the economy picks up again.