With the move of Linux into the enterprise space, more businesses are taking a closer look at open source software. The advantages include flexibility, cost and scalability. The disadvantages include availability of applications and support. However, these factors are being addressed.

At the same time major technology vendors are also looking at Linux, and enabling their hardware systems to run both proprietary and open source software.

Traditionally when purchasing a new application companies have purchased an additional server to run that application. However, this can prove costly and wasteful, as servers are typically purchased with more memory and processors than needed.

New developments have led to the emergence of server virtualisation.

These enable IT departments to aggregate server devices. The servers act as one, with combined memory, CPU and I/O. IT departments can now provision available memory and CPU as required.

Utility Computing (otherwise known as Grid Computing) addresses the issue of companies working with ‘islands’ of computing resources and software. By pooling industry standard servers and storage together into an adaptable infrastructure, customers can build large-scale computing capacity from inexpensive standardised components such as clusters of server blades and rack-mounted storage.

The need for a high-speed interconnect has been developed to meet the changing demands of the data centre and HPC environments.

InfiniBand Architecture is an industry standard, channel-based, switched fabric, interconnect architecture for servers, that provides high bandwidth communication (up to 10Gbps) and can scale to large node counts.