Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Voltaire's (News - Alert) Vice President of Marketing, Asaf Somekh. The company focuses on what Somekh called the "scale-out data center," and explained what they mean by "scale-out."

There's been a trend over the past few years, Somekh said, "where customers are designing and building new data centers," with hundreds and thousands of servers - he mentioned the recent news that eBay's (News - Alert) building a data center with over 15,000 servers in one center.

"We see this trend growing and growing," he said, adding that when people are building large data centers, "obviously they want to use the commodity element, basically the Intel (News - Alert)-based servers, and use them as building blocks for a data center that will scale and grow by adding more of these elements."

Obviously all of these customers use virtualization as well, he noted, "and the combination of virtualization and scale-out really changes the networking landscape." He described Voltaire's approach as "a way to build a data center that is dynamic," where if you need more resources "you add more of those commodity elements. And within the resources that you have, you can actually tunnel resources to a particular application that needs more at a particular time," or take resources from an application that is idle.

"The whole point," he said, "is how can you do it efficiently, how can you do it with the right timing? Because believe me, there's so much manual configuration that is done today, that we hear horrible stories about end users who want three more servers, and they're told well, you'll get them next week."

View the full video interview below (Apple (News - Alert) users click here):