"We think all the Web pages need to be generated from an application server that end users can access and that is tied to back-end databases, " says Burson, who believes NetWare 5.1 will address this issue.

CNN: New NetWare embraces Web apps

But if you take into account the use of open source products like Xen and KVM in massive data centers, web server farms, and by web application providers like Google and Salesforce.com, the CPUs running open source virtualization likely dwarfs the commercial market.

FORBES: Red Hat At $1 Billion

Developing applications for the new Web environments or even for the old client-server ones with less resource constraints changes how we think of application functionality.

FORBES: How to Make New Application Design Really Easy

Sun said in-house tests showed the application server running on a 64-way Sun Enterprise 10000 to be capable of handlingover 1, 500 Web-to-database transactions per second, and more than 2, 600 page views per second, or 225 million page viewsper day.

CNN: Sun unveils app server strategy