Read an interesting discussion on the lkml list where Linus and friends talked about atime's performance impacts (http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148). Ingo phrased the problem best with:

' For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a ... write to
the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we
read from the cache ... do a write to the disk! '

Solutions are to mount your file systems with the noatime, nodiratime options. The only time this may cause a problem is if you have a local mail spool (the mailer will not know that new email arrived) or possibly with some backup software.

At work, every new technology we introduce must go through engineering and financial justification and be approved by a standards governance body. This is to help corral the proliferation of technology choices that we already have throughout the world.

My most recent major technology introduction is Solaris Containers for virtualization. Awhile back the Windows team introduced VMware for Windows virtualization (and our Linux team has never been happy since that Windows controls VMWare ESX, which runs on a Linux base). It is starting to gain traction and now there is some demand for Unix virtualization.