Chris Boos on Automation

First Microsoft’s concept to build servers into 40ft containers was tauntet by some people. Now after the industry adapted this concept, the advantages of their idea regarding flexibility and power effectiveness are approved and several companies jumped on the bandwagon:

• Dell <READ_HERE>
• HP <AND HERE>
• IBM <HERE>
• Sun <OLD_NEWS_HERE>

but wait, why are news from Sun old?. Right – Sun presented their Project Blackbox 2 years ago, but they seemed to be ahead of time, maybe the oilprice wasn’t hight enough and the worldwide crisis was beyond imagination or ….

To give you the full storie, datacenter containers were invented by – guess who – Google. This is really alarming, because they seem to have finger in every pie <LINK>. As I found out, Google patented the concept of having many servers inside a container and stacking multiple containers to a datacenter in 2003 <READ_HERE>. While Sun misinterpreted the concept just for creating a showcase for server hardware, other put more efforts in developing the idea. How the idea evolved, you can see here:

Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision

Thanks to datacenterknowledge.com, who directed my to this story.

Roland

The worlds-famous retiree Bill Gates annouced some weeks ago, that in the future Microsoft will have many millions of servers in their datacenters, which first of all is a very impressive proposition. Nicolas carr has some thoughts on Bills speech <HERE>.

If you break down the numbers – Microsoft claims to add between 10.000 to 20.000 servers to their infrastructure each month – and read datacenter newsletters like <THIS> and <THAT>, you soon will realize, that this definitely will become true rather sooner than later. Sure, MS has to because we might be right before a huge shift of paradigm in the software industy – moving every type of application and data from your destop straight to some datacenter somewhere (hi Google) . Thus making Microsofts main business modell looking kind of old-fashioned.

If you bring things together and look at “Live Mesh” and “Office Live” you will understand, where the world will be in 3 to 5 years from now.

And, I’ll promise you: Microsoft is paying attention to the enterprise market much better than Google and Apple together.

Roland