For the past decade the topic of virtualization has been echoed across a broad range of industries, from video processing to health care, flight simulation and enterprise computing. While often touted as a modern day miracle of technology, the roots of virtualization go all the way back to the 1960’s when IBM developed the very first virtualization platforms as a way to logically partition mainframe computer systems in a fashion that would create a number of “virtual” machines.
IBM System 360 Model 67 Mainframe
This was the advent of multi-tasking, in which one computer could run multiple applications at the same time and serve hundreds of users. “Time-sharing” was the buzz word of the day, as the expense of such mainframes required high utilization rates to justify the cost. In this way, small businesses lacking the resources to afford their own mainframe could still gain access to this computing power by paying for just the time they used.
Personal computers made their way into companies during the 1980’s, and though initially limited in effectiveness due to their stand-alone nature, that situation soon changed with the advent of local area networks. Deployment of these networks provided the necessary framework for development of client- server applications as a way to centralize data yet distribute processing power to the desktop. It was a radical shift in how data was created, stored and utilized, but the architecture was far from perfect.
Client Server Network Diagram
As it turns out, the client-server paradigm didn’t scale all that well, as the expense of deploying separate servers for each application became a costly proposition for most companies. Racks of these dedicated servers were built to handle the workload, but as user counts and the need for processing power and data storage increased, IT departments found themselves in constant upgrade mode.
The main problem was really one of utilization. As with automobile traffic on the highway, or electricity usage within a community, there are peaks and valleys in computing demand, which always required companies to provide enough processing power to handle peak demand on each of their many servers, even if the majority of the time these servers were underutilized. So how did we eventually get out from under the dilemma of client-server computing?
In part two we’ll examine how the rebirth of virtualization technology on x86 hardware platforms saved the day, and continues to shift the landscape of mission critical computing.
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