Steven McDowell

Steven McDowell is the Division Manager, Emerging Technologies for the Microprocessor Solutions Sector at AMD. In this role, McDowell is responsible for AMD's strategy for key emerging technologies, overseeing AMD's long-term security and virtualization strategies. Prior to AMD, McDowell held a number of technology architecture roles across the industry. He has 20 years of IT industry experience.

McDowell is an established author, having written several books and articles on technology issues, including Windows 2000 Kernel Debugging (Prentice-Hall, 2000) and USB Explained (Prentice-Hall, 1998). McDowell holds multiple patents on x86 server and storage architecture and has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences. Past engagements include VMWorld, eCommerce Technology Infrastructure Conference, SAN Summit, ASPCon Fall, eDevCon, and USENIX.

Server Consolidation in Open Source Environments

Open source architecture is gaining stature with enterprise IT managers as a cost-effective alternative to proprietary operating systems. Making open source even more attractive, multi-core processing can now help make the process of server virtualization a mainstream technology for open source infrastructures and promises to deliver more efficiencies and economies to IT departments. In this presentation, the speaker will describe recent advances in the areas of multi-core processing and virtualization for open source environments and how they can now help deliver greater performance from and efficient use of existing IT resources. He will explain how server virtualization enables a single machine to run multiple operating systems efficiently while maintaining secure, guaranteed isolation between systems. The session shows how server virtualization consolidates IT resources across the enterprise, reducing total cost of computing infrastructure, and allowing enterprises to run legacy operating systems and applications on top of new operating systems and hardware.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• How to implement server virtualization in an open source environment to partition, consolidate and manage critical computing infrastructure.
• How server virtualization improves IT ROI and reduces total cost of ownership.
• Innovations in integrated memory controllers and transport technology that enable more efficient memory and I/O access in open systems.
• How multi-core processing along with server virtualization leverages open source flexibility for faster response to changing business demands.