AnandTech has done a little bit of math and pointed out a little problem that will hit us by the end of the year.  With the new CPU’s coming from both companies and the fact that they will have several dozen cores or threads, that 4Gb/s connection will be split up so many ways that it will no longer be fast enough to feed those CPUs.  We will be seeing servers with such incredible density that 100Gb/s services are no longer a dream, they will be a necessity to anyone wanting to take advantage of Magny-Cours or Nehalem EX.  Drop by and see what solutions they see as feasible in a world where several dozen virtual machines have to share a connection.

“In the second quarter of this year, we’ll have affordable servers with up to 48 cores (AMD’s Magny -cours) and 64 threads (Intel Nehalem EX). The most obvious way to wield all that power is to consolidate massive amounts of virtual machines on those powerhouses. Typically, we’ll probably see something like 20 to 50 VMs on such machines. Port aggregation with a quad-port gigabit Ethernet card is probably not going to suffice. If we have 40 VMs on a quad-port Ethernet, that is less than 100Mbit/s per VM. We are back in the early Fast Ethernet days. Until virtualization took over, our network intensive applications would get a gigabit pipe; now we will be offering them 10 times less? This is not acceptable.”

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