The power of a X86 server with four array cores has increased dramatically according to Moore's Law. At the same time, enterprises, through the success of scale out, now realize that they have more physical servers than they can deal with. This situation has resulted from the IT scalability best practice of installing a single instance of an application per OS on a single scale. Many organizations now find themselves with 1,000 of servers, with increasingly high energy bills, and with no data center space to house these devices.

Simon Crosby, the CTO of Citrix's Virtualization and Management Division, and chief evangelizer of the Xen open source hypervisor, says that server virtualization rationalizes the X86 server base by consolidating it into fewer devices, by reducing the power consumption, by minimizing the cooling requirements, and by controlling real estate management costs. He says, "It's an emerging property of the explosion of the demand for the X86 platform."

In this podcast, Crosby talks about what affect issues like globalization have on the concept of server virtualization, how server virtualization can affect an organization's total cost of ownership, how IT organizations can avoid making server virtualization more complex than it needs to be, and why the IT Infrastructure holds the key for effective server virtualization.

As chief technology officer for Citrix's Virtualization and Management Division, Simon Crosby evangelizes the Xen open source hypervisor. This former XenSource CTO also oversees XenEnterprise research and development, technology leadership. and product management, and maintains a close affiliation to the Xen project run by Ian Pratt, the founder of XenSource. Before Citrix XenSource, he held positions as a principal engineer at Intel, and as president and CEO of CPlant, a network optimization software vendor. Crosby has written more than 35 research papers and patents about data center and networking topics including network and server virtualization. He speaks frequently at LinuxWorld, Interop and the Server Blade Summit.

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Tom Parish, Host and Audio  Producer

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