Virtual Blade Runner
For the past two years it seems, the public hype surrounding the imminent blade server revolution is just around the corner. This was proceeded by a couple more years of underground hype. Blade servers are all over the trade rags, and have driven vendors into a frenzy trying to figure out ways to capitalize on this almost-any-time-now exploding market.
But I’ve still yet to see a production blade installation. Everything I’ve seen so far is a proof of concept.
Virtualization is another hot topic that also has vendor CEO’s knickers in a collective twist, but again I’ve yet to see a real product. Virtualization has revolutionized development, but the only company that I’ve seen pull off virtualization for production environments is IBM, and then only with their mainframes (they’ve been doing virtualization since the 70’s at least).
A couple of load balancing vendors have released products for VMware or blade-specific products, but nothing has really taken off.
I don’t doubt that virtualization and blades will make an impact, but I don’t think I’m going to speculate anymore on when that’s going to happen. I feel rather disappointed about it really, and I don’t allow myself to build up the hope when, like the promise of flying cars, the impending revolution gets postponed again.
Not that I don’t love my car. But it would be rad if it could fly. Also, if it transformed into a robot, that would be cool too.
