In response to my “web hosting can no longer be considered a core competency” (it’s true!) post, Santosh Dawara brought up Greg Matter‘s bold statement that the world needs only 5 computers.
By computer, Greg (who works for Sun) means a “hyperscale, pan-global broadband computing service”. The Google grid, for instance. Microsoft’s Live platform. Salesforce.com – especially given its plans to build an iTunes like store for third party SaaS apps. They are sooo going to start offering hosting! Can you imagine iTunes not hosting the music they sell?? Amazon and eBay are possibilities as well. Greg also thinks we’ll see the emergence of a Great Computer of China, and a commenter puts Akamai in the running. (BTW, Akamai disagrees with Mirror Image’s claim that it has a lower cache-hit ratio. Stayed tuned for their story in separate post.)
Each “computer”, Greg says, will consist of “millions of processing, storage and networking elements, globally distributed into critical-mass clusters” of possibly 5,000 nodes each. (That does sort of sound like Akamai, only much bigger.) Because emerging trends such as SaaS and online video will grow faster than Moore’s Law. As he puts it:
“A company like Salesforce.com sees hypergrowth not in the form of intrinsic demand for CRM, but rather the sum of consolidation of CRM systems across thousands upon thousands of companies.”
It takes tremendous capex (such as Microsoft’s $980 million Texas data center project and Google’s rumored $750 million facility in South Carolina) to accommodate this kind of spectacular snowballing growth. Greg thinks only the Big Five will be up to task. As for everyone else? “Either you will grow to become one of the big Computers, or you’ll be acquired and be Borg-ed into one of them!” (Well, there’s also the possibility that they’d push you out of business?) Of course, some large enterprises will want to operate their own infrastructure. Greg thinks those folks will get bunches of Blackboxes instead of building traditional data centers.
Thought provoking stuff, no?
