Page 63 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE AMORPHOUS CL OUD

to multiple world population centers, and let one data center
supplement another, perhaps as part of the world goes to
sleep and another part wakes up.
I previously estimated that Google operates 500,000 to
600,000 servers in its 12 data centers and auxiliary processing
facilities around the world (no one outside Google knows for

sure) and has plans to manage up to one million or more. (As
this was being written, a report, unconfirmed by Google, cir-
culated among knowledgeable server and software suppliers
that Google crossed the one million server mark in 2009.) At
some point, the server count becomes irrelevant. What mat-
ters is how effectively these masses of computers can stay up
and running, meet massive user demand, and survive faults

and mishaps in their own operation and natural disasters out-
side them. The day may come when a giant cluster will fail, but
its users won’t notice. The other clusters linked to it should
prove able to take on its workload, with only a slight impact on
overall user response times. That would be an acceptable
trade-off in cloud computing.
Nevertheless, the size achieved by an individual cluster has
reached a very large scale. The cluster dragon has been slain,
or at least his all-consuming wrath has been circumvented.

And a new management layer is thrown over the whole clus-
ter that requires few people to keep it running, a major con-
tributor to the new economies of scale. If these new clusters
can be expanded indefinitely, then much of the cloud’s mys-
tique revolves around the potential new consumer services
that such large facilities might enable.

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