Page 14 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

INTRODUC TION

second story of the building, hardware in a more traditional,
raised-floor data center was already humming away.
Microsoft’s facility is designed for 300,000 servers, and
according to Microsoft’s president of servers and tools, Bob
Muglia, as best he knows, it’s the largest data center on earth.
A short while before Microsoft opened its doors, Google

had opened a window on what had previously been the secret
design of its own data centers. A Google camera crew showed
an unpretentious-looking technician, possibly a recent high
school graduate, mounting a razor scooter and scooting along
the warehouse floor to a server unit. He extracted a failed
server from the rack and inserted a new server, a unit that ap-
peared to be about 3.5 inches thick, with a sheet metal baffle

to keep the heat-generating parts separate from the cooler
parts of the machine. That’s not how they do it in the enter-
prise data center. This is not your father’s data center.
Google and Amazon.com pioneered these concepts, and
Microsoft and others have picked them up and produced their
own implementations. When data centers such as this are built
out of what are basically PC parts, with one server cluster con-
sisting of thousands of servers, when very-large-scale parallel
processing software is applied to the cluster, and when the

governing software routes jobs around hardware failures, you
have something new, a “cloud” data center. It is a string of 12
or more such data centers around the world that powers the
marvelous Google search engine. And more are being built
next to 2 cents per kilowatt hour sources of hydroelectric
energy rather than the 11 cents per kilowatt hour energy that
powers the computers on which this book was edited. Energy

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