It seems like half the articles I read online and in hard-copy papers and magazines these days mention the explosive growth in the number of servers being used by everybody and his uncle. Everything you sign up for includes gigabytes of online storage, 'free' websites, 15 email addresses, and so forth. Digitization of all the hard-copy published writing, photography, painting, video and music in human history is in progress but will, when completed, only occupy a tiny corner of the exploding aggregate online storage universe.
Some Google technical guru talked at a conference the other day about how Google assembles their own servers out of motherboards built by Intel to Google specs. The two most remarkable (to me) points he made were the sheer number of servers they're using, and the software system they've devised, not for search itself, but just to make their mind-boggling server farms fault tolerant and as widely distributed as possible. It was mostly operating system and file system stuff, related to search only loosely (although he separately discussed search software issues).
It reminded me--a little--of the original cold-war-era ARPA project that turned into the internet: a way to allow a widely distributed network to survive direct nuclear strikes on some number of its nodes. Google has done this with unbelievably huge and complex cluster-systems that make the original ARPAnet look like three tin cans on two strings.
So with all this going on in a burgeoning server environment where the demand will grow at least geometrically for the foreseeable future, a company like Sun, that was hyping distributed computing before anyone else could even spell it, and was into servers and blades and so forth early on, and has been thinking about that kind of system architecture and software problem literally for decades, goes down the tubes to oblivion with shrinking revenues and a vanishing reputation?
It seems like it would almost take some kind of special skill or magic trick to make that happen. The 'not' in dot com.
Every time I read one of these articles I shake my head.
--QS |
