Virtualisation promises to solve this by allowing individual server computers to pretend to be several ‘virtual’ servers at once. This ensures that each expensive bit of hardware is used efficiently. As virtual servers are software creations, new ones can be started just like a program on your PC. No need to order new hardware or wait for it to arrive.

HP Labs are working on the challenge of scaling this simple model (one computer, several virtual servers) into a virtual data centre (many computers, many virtual servers). It’s a tough problem. For example; what happens if a virtual server suddenly needs a lot of extra horsepower, perhaps in response to a surge of visitors on a website or rolling up accounts at the end of the year? How do you ensure that each new virtual server is right for the job and properly secure? What if a job requires several servers working together?

One of the answers is SmartFrog, developed at HP Labs. It is a framework, including a language, a software engine and a set of components, for describing how to build complex systems, such as clusters of interrelated servers. Give it a recipe for a typical business setup, say a sophisticated database running on several servers, and it builds properly-configured virtual servers automatically. It has been specially constructed to deal with the configuration of massive-scale systems.