Robin's Hood

As Lynn Tan reports for ZDNet below, next generation data centres will be virtualised.

I was recently nominated for an award for my participation in a project to work with Amazon in their innovative Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This data centre is virtualised on so many levels like you wouldn't believe. The servers are virtualised Linux. The backups are virtualised,. Your collection of servers are protected from others in a vitual data centre. I have little idea what the physical arrangements are and frankly I don't care much.

I suppose it comes down to this, if you trust someone then will take their word for it on certain issues. I work for an energy company, and IT is not their core business. Amazon is an IT company and it has a data centre at the heart of their business. I trust them to keep my data safe and to protect me from attack otherwise they would go out of business, right? I have been wrong before. Once in 1976 and once in 1995. I am not wrong on this one. In five years time all data centres will be like this.

Virtualisation key to next-gen data centres - ZDNet UK: "'IDC has identified virtualisation as one of the key technologies underpinning the successful evolution of existing data centres to the next-generation platform.'"