John Gage coined perhaps the best phrase in the history of the computer industry, "The Network is the Computer." Ironically, it appears as though Google, a server buyer, (not HP, IBM, Intel or Sun) is building the world's largest, fastest, most reliable and scalable computer. By using inexpensive servers and assuming components will fail, Google (with the Google File System) was led to an architecture that spreads operating systems, file systems, applications and data across entire server infrastructures worldwide ensuring lightning fast response times and always-on application availability. While the world's leading server vendors still provide architectures that, for the most part, presume a one-to-one relationship between server and application, Google is paving the way for the real growth opportunity in Web services by spreading everything, everywhere.
Action Item: Web service delivery is driving demand for new blade server architectures. Vendors must re-think traditional definitions of servers and make blade computing the underpinning of new approaches to architecting network-based systems where the presumption of frequent component failure and highly distributed computing resources are fundamental to designs.
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