Dan Kimball from Modern Bill emailed me about the arms race article in Wired. First of all, do you know Dan? If you don’t, you should! And if you know him as the automated-billing go-to guy, Dan is that and an expert on soooo many other aspects of web hosting besides.
So the Wired article (it’s on page 180 in the October issue and now online here) is definitely a must read (as is Jon Price’s blog post on the article). It starts with a long string of big numbers on Google’s data center capacity. For instance:
Google’s database now takes up several hundred petabytes of storage space across no fewer than 450,000 servers. Its cluster contains 4 petatypes of memory (that’s 4,000,000 GB worth of RAM strips!). Its bandwidth usage is approx 3 petabytes per second. Its newest data center in The Dalles, Oregon features easy access to not just a 1.8-gigawatt power station, but also the 640 Gbps PC-1 fiber-optic artery between the US and Asia.
Microsoft, too, is building a new data center near the Columbia River. Its servers now consume 10x more power compared with 3 years ago, and is expected to need 10x more within the next 5 years.
Both Google and Microsoft officials believe in an architecture shift, whereby the client-server model will be replaced with applications running on cloud servers – THEIR servers. And the new math behind their arms race works like so: RAM costs 100x more than disk storage, but it can be accessed 10,000x faster than disks. RAM is therefore 100x cheaper. With billions in the bank and web apps being the next frontier, there’s nothing more important than delivering a seamless end user experience.
What implications do these stats have on the web hosting industry?
First, the end is near for the one customer, one stand-alone server business model. Seriously. Wired says Google is all about delivering pageloads (even for search results, mind you) within 1/20th of a second. With no downtime, ever. If a server owner runs into hardware problems and has to wait hours for his equipment to be replaced, an OS reload to be completed, data to be restored, etc, he can’t possibly measure up to the average web user’s expectations.
Google operations chief Urs Holzle wrote in 2005 that connecting cheap processors in parallel offers a theoretical chance (which Google has proven) for a scalable system. That sounds a lot like what 3tera‘s software does. ServePath recently deployed a 3tera grid. DataReturn has also come out with a new product based on its proprietary 200-core Opteron array. These kinds of developments will accelerate in the coming months.
Second, Google’s Holzle tells Wired that “a power company could give away PCs and make a substantial profit selling power”. Hey, there’s an idea. Especially since data centers will supposedly consume half of the world’s electricity output by the end of this decade.
Might we see some M&A activity that combines major utilities with web hosting providers? Let’s ask Paul 
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