Denny Lane

Flexible, fluid, and fast-evolving, software has regularly outstripped the capacity of the hardware it runs on, which by its nature is more rigid and slower to change. For most computer users that difference might mean occasionally sluggish performance or an inability to use certain features, depending on what hardware/software combination they're using. When the software intelligence in question is virtualization, however, the stakes are much higher. Since virtualization's foundational benefit is to operate multiple application servers on each physical server, virtualization gradually reintroduces single points of failure back into the IT infrastructure years after server-based architectures minimized them. Distributed server architectures resist complete system failure by running critical applications on discrete physical servers. Server crashes could only take o... (more)

Virtualization and Fault Tolerance

Virtualization and fault-tolerant technology are like the would-be ideal couple, a match made in heaven, but who never meet, even though they're constantly in the same place at the same time. That can be a funny conundrum in romantic comedies, but in the real IT world, virtualization and fault tolerance need to get together quickly and often. IT organizations that are virtualizing their server infrastructures need both technologies if they're going to succeed in building platforms that have virtualization's efficiency but also provide the continuous availability they need to supp... (more)