AMD Announces Deals With Dell, VMware
Virtualization is one of the very few areas within IT in which the hardware and software are equally important. There's lots of virtualization software, and at the same time, a growing amount of virtualization-tuned hardware on which to run it.
Chip maker AMD is making some new inroads into the virtualization space, announcing that Dell is carrying its brand-new Quad-Core Opteron procs, and also that it has certified those same chips to work with VMware's ESX and ESXi hypervisors.
The new Operton chips will be available in a number of Dell's servers, including the 6950; PowerEdge SC1435 and 2970; and M605 blade server. There's a new SMB server offered as well, the PowerEdge T605 tower. All except the T605 are two-socket servers; with quad-core procs, that gives the virtualization environment eight processors' worth of resources.
The Opteron features Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), a technology that takes functionality previously done in software, and accelerates it through CPU power. It reduces the overhead associated with software virtualization, enabling applications that IT might have been previously hesitant to virtualize, like databases, to gain the advantages of virtualization.
AMD's Tim Meuting said in a previous briefing on the Opteron that RVI "enables some of those apps to work better and enables customers to implement them. Internal benchmarks show that depending on the solution, you might see anywhere from 15 to 100 percent improvement" in performance over processors that don't use RVI.
Posted by Keith Ward on 04/22/2008 at 12:48 PM