One of the hardest parts about managing a data center is not necessarily the task of “keeping the lights on”, but instead, it’s “changing the bulbs.”

This week I am hearing a lot about the “cash for clunkers” program here in the US, where older cars can be traded in for newer more fuel efficient vehicles, with the government kicking in some rebate dollars to make it all happen if you are buying a more fuel efficient vehicle.  I’m not going to even pretend to think about this from a political sense (there is a reason I chose product marketing and not politics), but, from a business sense, this sort of activity is happening in data centers all over the world.  Even without the government assistance.

Are people changing out servers just to drive more efficiency?  Hardly.  But in a tough economy, they think about optimization, they think about efficiency and they think about virtualization when they have to make a change.

As customers look to pull the plug on older servers that are past their useful life -- either through warranty or lease expiration, or potentially due to a hardware failure that is too costly to repair -- they are looking to more power efficient servers as well as virtualization to solve their future computing challenges.

The migration to a new platform is costly, time consuming and full of interesting challenges. One way to overcome some of these challenges is to use virtualization to encapsulate the server, creating a virtual machine.  With the system image (software) now physically abstracted from the hardware, it can be moved anywhere around the data center, or around the world.

This new level of abstraction is great, but one of the real challenges is that a virtual machine has to take the “lowest common denominator” in order to move between two systems.  The flexibility to move virtual machines around, at will, is dependent on the underlying hardware.

AMD has designed an amazing consistency in our architectural design, allowing a server to have backwards and forwards consistency in moving virtual machines -- a feat that is much more challenging on other’s platforms unless you really scale the virtual machine back to a very simple configuration.

Here, we actually demonstrate taking a virtual machine from an old dual core, to a newer six-core platform, and then move that virtual machine to our future AMD Opteron^TM 6000 processor-based platform.

As you look to optimize your data center, utilizing AMD Opteron processors can help keep your environment humming along, with the ability to load balance and drive incredible efficiency through virtualization.  The fact that we can deliver such flexibility across the board shows that AMD understands the challenges that you face, and we tailor our products to meet those needs.

Not only can we help you drive better efficiency by moving from older AMD platforms to AMD’s newer, more power efficient platforms, but our common socket strategy allows many of the AMD Opteron^TM based-platforms to be easily upgraded from dual core to quad core, or even six core, virtually without having to change out any other hardware. It’s an instant upgrade in performance, all within the same general power and thermal ranges.

These are just two more ways that AMD is helping you drive more efficiency in the data center.  Maybe we can’t hand back “cash for clunkers”, but we can help get you back on the road to recovery, and that’s where we all want to be these days.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.