However, HP is planning to introduce this facility for its new Superdome servers in the first quarter of next year. This approach will allow customers to turn processing power on and off like a tap while only paying for what they consume. This ability to control several aspects of system capacity will give customers a high degree of flexibility. For example, if a customer wants to fully test out their disaster recovery plans they could turn on extra CPUs, memory and storage for a short while and then once the testing was complete, revert back to their original configuration. In this way the customer only needs to pay for the extra capacities used during the test period rather than having expensive kit lying around idle for most of the time.
CoD is a useful facility and as it becomes more flexible it is likely to grow in popularity.
It is probable that most major system manufacturers will provide CoD as a standard feature of new products in the near future. There are several ways in which additional system capacity can be provided, but CPU CoD is the most common offering. CoD offers the ability to meet unexpected demands on systems.