The green datacenter

I've often written on the topic of how the different layers of virtualization technology could be used to build a datacenter that makes better use of energy. So, I found it interesting when Dell's analyst relations folks sent me a copy of a paper authored by John Pflueger, Ph. D. Although it presents an image of a scholarly paper, it also includes the warning "THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY kIND." In other words, it is a document created to put forward Dell's marketing messages in a form that would appear to be a more technical, more neutral document.

Since I've written hundreds of similar documents, I understand the approach - gather enough information that can be seen as supporting the supplier's case. Since Dell is a supplier of industry standard systems, it is not really surprising that neither the word "mainframe" nor the word "midrange" can't be found in the document. I guess that is because Dell hopes that the view that it presents could be mistaken for a view that fits the majority of large organization datacenters.

Unfortunately, those datacenters typically include midrange systems from many suppliers (usually running UNIX) and mainframes. Since they're not mentioned, the paper is really too narrow to entirely present the reality in those datacenters even though the concepts presented are interesting.

The document can be found here. Why don't you give it a read and let me know what you think?