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Technology: Build-Your-Own Data Center
Competitive advantage. It’s the secret ingredient of many highly successful companies. The problem is that today’s hard-to-copy innovations are often tomorrow’s bargain-priced commodities.
One example is what’s happening now with data centers. The recipe for the secret ingredients behind the success of data centers from online giants like Amazon and Google is being studied and copied. Advances in technologies like federated databases, virtualization and cheap computer hardware are fueling the advances.
Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes reports that universities are researching and creating an optimized game plan for how to build cheap, highly-scalable data centers. The article describes the work of Armando Fox at the University of California, Berkeley. Fox is the director of Berkeley’s RAD Lab project, a project with the goal to “make the building and running of data centers as easy an engineering feat as putting up a new building and turning on the lights”.
Our vision is to enable one person to invent and run the next revolutionary IT service, operationally expressing a new business idea as a multi-million-user service over the course of a long weekend. By doing so we hope to enable an Internet “Fortune 1 million”.
The RAD Lab at Berkeley is funded by Sun, Microsoft and Google.
Rather than a central database, the RAD approach is to spread computing power across many, potentially thousands, of processors. The concept of a central database which controls access to a single correct data view becomes much harder to achieve. The RAD approach is more fuzzy. Rather than the concept of locking and concurrency, there is a greater emphasis on speed over absolute truth. If two people query at almost the same time, their answers may differ slightly, but the results will be similar. In the world of RAD, that result is OK.
Where is it all going? Commoditized data centers. Data centers will become very cheap to setup and operate, and even more likely, data centers will become an item that can be easily outsourced.
