[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[JF Mezei]

On 12-10-01 08:13, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> Do you seriously think that senior Google management doesn't look for 
> ways to lower their power bills?

If their "religion" is one of not using proprietary systems, then that
trumps any power efficiency decisions. They will choose the best
possible power efficiency implementation that fits their religion.

So while one can claim that Google's implementation of an architecture
based on tens of thousands of small independent servers is the most
efficient of THAT architecture, it does not mean that THAT architecture
is more power efficient than one based on mainframes.


The extra power/cooling costs associated with such an architecture may
be worth the independence from one vendor (and what do you do when the
vendor ends that product line etc) and may very well be a sound decision.

Having been burned by Digital abandonning VMS, PSION abandonning PDAs,
and now Apple abandonning servers, I can fully understand Google's
desire to have full control over its servers so that it can't be screwed
by anyone.

But that does not mean that having 10,000 servers is the most power
efficient solution.

Now, consider why a company would not want to be tied to a computer
vendor. This is where the problem lies.

In the context of the millenials,  DEC was already dead, and Compaq/HP
showed they could not be trusted because of how they killed off product
lines.  Nobody was sure whether Sun and/or SPARC would survive, and that
left expensive IBM.

This whole business of relegating Alpha to high end machines is what
killed high end machines. (same for that IA64 thing). If you want to get
into the millenial companies, you need to have a viable low end offering
they can grow with from their basement opetation and scale up to marger
mainframe class machines once they become the world's largest company.