The good news for CIOs is that a growing amount of vendor investment has been drawn to this market, which Gartner has named Data Center Infrastructure Management. nlyte software, for example, provides a modeling, monitoring, and management suite for understanding power and cooling in a data center and optimizing placement and configuration of racks and servers.

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Google, by its configuration of hundreds of thousands of commodity servers into a massive, parallel, virtual supercomputer used for search, has worked out, by intent or accident, the enterprise computer platform of the future.

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Chef is a configuration tool for managing infrastructure by allowing users to automatically and reproducibly configure installations on servers.

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