Winner: vTARDIS (Transportable Awfully Revolutionary Data Centre of Invisible Servers) IT project owner: Simon Gallagher Vendors and technology used: VMware Inc. vSphere 4.0 and 4.1 Vyatta Core Openfiler Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hewlett-Packard Co. ML115 G5 Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) quad-core processors IT project: Gallagher's lab features low storage latency and solid performance. Gallagher's configuration also pushes beyond the "official" use of VMware technology by using solid-state drives to reduce disk I/O and "nested VMware ESX" instances, which give the appearance of owning many ESX hosts when the entire infrastructure actually sits on one physical box. His configuration runs eight virtual ESX hosts and nearly 60 virtual machines on just the one physical server, rather than multiple PCs and storage appliances. What the judges said: "No other entry showed the same degree of doing a lot with so little." << PREVIOUS | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | NEXT >> |