THE Arab world lost $2.5 trillion in the past four months, according to data from the recent Arab economic summit in Kuwait. It's a mind-boggling loss considering that less than one-third of the amount is about all that US President Barack Obama needs to kick-start the world's biggest economy out of recession. Couple this with the International Labor Organization's forecast on Wednesday that up to 50 million people worldwide could possibly get the pink slip this year as companies downsize or go belly up without the growth hormone of easy credit, and the gravity of today's great question weighing down managers everywhere should sink in: What do we do now? There is no one single answer except that, for starters, companies need to move quickly to identify areas where they think they can be more efficient. IT or information technology is one such area of promise, since it is generally not given the care it deserves because few in top management – especially of companies where IT is that basement den where the geeks chill out in near freezing temperatures while those big computers there collect and deliver all kinds of data to front-end PCs, laptops and Blackberries – understand terms like “data center, “virtualization” or “cloud computing.” But in these very terms lie the one prerequisite that's critical for business survival in the new reality: Speed, allowing for a far greater reach than ever and encompassing nearly all aspects of business operations at far greater processing power and far lower costs. That's what Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, is aggressively promoting as he heralds the supercomputing fourth wave with an array of information technologies that deliver hard returns, measurable costs and energy savings. But first, the wacky terminology. A data center is that basement den housing the most critical systems of a company's computer network's – the servers storing a huge amount of data, backup power supplies, air conditioning, and security applications. Typical examples of companies that almost certainly have a data center are banks, travel agencies, television-channel and telecommunications service providers, and, in general, firms that have multiple officers in various locations and huge inventories, like automotive companies. Virtualization, on the other hand, is a proven software technology that lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments, thus dramatically cutting costs and improving resource utilization. These days, different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer. (VMware is the market leader in virtualization, used by more than 120,000 customers, including all the Fortune 100 companies.) Complementing virtualization is cloud computing or “on-demand computing,” which allows Internet-based access to highly scalable pay-per-use IT capabilities. The network of servers and connections is collectively known as “the cloud.” It is through cloud computing that iPhone, Blackberry or laptop users access supercomputer-level power for resources as they need them. Dell's insistence on companies' top management learning what these terms can mean – in terms of cost-cutting and optimizing performance – is borne out of its own experience of revamping its data center to keep up with the fast-paced times. “The new data center behaves as a living organism,” said Rakesh Kumar, VP of Gartner Data Center Research recently in London. Clearly sold on the idea, he was presumably comparing Dell's new data center to the evolving human brain and its endless possibilities. More pertinently, he went on to explain how Dell managed to cut more than $29 million in cost and dropped plans to build a new data center by virtualizing over 5,000 of its servers that were previously working at less than 20 percent of their processing capacity. Kumar said that by upgrading to Dell's PowerEdge Energy Smart Servers and Blade servers – without the need to build new infrastructure – companies can extend the life of their current servers and increase computing capacity by as much as 270 percent. Besides, with Dell Data Center Optimization Services, customers can reduce energy cost by 50 to 70 percent, added Rick Becker, Dell VP of Software and Solutions, noting that data center energy use was projected in 2005 to rise 1,600 percent by 2025, given the increasing scope of computing power. “It's about building a smarter enterprise,” Becker said, going on to speak about blades and rack servers and all that, which top management should eventually come across on the way to the cloud. The bigger picture is that the Top 10 strategic technology areas for 2009, identified by CIOs (chief information officers or, in singular, the head of those sleepy geeks in the basement) has virtualization on top of the list, followed by cloud computing, green IT, servers (beyond blades), web-oriented architectures, enterprise mash-ups, specialized systems, social software and social networking (helps extend a company's reach into and interaction with its potential client base), unified communication, and lastly, business intelligence. These are all high potential areas of business growth in these hard times when funding is scare for even business travel or on-site physical interaction with markets. Simply put, it's time to get the machines to work far harder (according to International Data Center, 65 percent of the IT spend of corporates go to administration and maintenance, where there's little scope for appreciable growth in profitability). Dell, the CEO, was quoted as saying at a Supercomputing 2008 trade show in the US last November that the fourth supercomputing wave will deliver higher density machines, probably in blade or other customized form factors, pools of shared storage, and focus on one of the pain points in clusters – running and administering them. Lest we get carried away by what all this can possibly mean if we do indeed get virtualized clusters in a cloud to behave themselves, consider this interesting bit of reportage from Dell's speech by Timothy Prickett Morgan, who is arguably the best online recourse for top management wanting to understand those cool geeks saving up on energy in the basement by letting their machines do all the hard work. “The human brain, Dell said, has some 100 billion neurons, each with some 1,000 or so synapses, each running at around 200 cycles per second. When you do the math, that's around 20 petaflops of raw computing performance, which if it could be built today - and it can't; we have just broken through the petaflops barrier – would cost an estimated $3.6bn. Here's the catchy bit. ‘The human brain uses about 20 watts of energy, so we evidently still have a long way to go,' quipped Dell.” Damn! But wait, doesn't every cloud out there now have a silver lining?
