Back when I was new to computers we had things like punch cards, floppies (including the 8" variety) and slow, I mean slow machines, but no matter how slow that we thought the computers were back then, the applications that we were running did not tax the processors all that much. Really, how much processing power did you really need to update text (monochrome test at that) on a screen?
Then came personal computers and then this funny little program called "Windows" that had a graphical interface that started to use more and more resources on the computer (a trend that continues to this day).
So now the applications, and their associated operating systems, were starting to put more and more strain on the computer slowing it to a crawl. Storage space also was a big deal (remember the programmer's motto: "you give me space I will fill it up!"). Now we could upgrade our machine's hardware (at a cost), but it was not until the advent of faster and cheaper computers that the hardware actually started to pull away from the software to the point that now, unless you are playing some high-end games, you are probably not taxing your computer a whole lot with that turbo-tax program that you are using (yes, even you Mr. Gates).
So why the history lesson? I want to set the groundwork for the NEXT BIG THING! (sorry for the yelling, but I do get a little excited)...Virtualization. If you haven't used software such as Microsoft VPC or VMWare what in the heck are you waiting for? You are certainly going to see virtualization as part of new operating systems (Windows Server 2008 for example).
Virtualization allows you to use one physical machine and have it 'host' other logical machines that are optimized to do specific tasks on your network. Up to this point we could have multiple services running on the same machine, but if to optimize one service you had to take away from another, you really were not gaining anything. With virtual machines, you basically have multiple separate entities that can be treated independently and secured, optimized and configured for a specific role.
Now we have a way of using the resources on our big honking computers (BHC for the non-technical crowd) as efficiently as possible.
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