Page 30 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

cloud seem to mesmerize those who have learned the details
of one or gotten near one, and in truth, many end user serv-
ices currently found in the applications on the desktop are
likely to be served from the cloud in the future. These data
centers are often large warehouse-style buildings, with few
windows, surrounded by chain-link fences. Inside, row upon

row of pizza box–style servers, or even smaller “blade” servers,
are stuffed into racks standing seven feet tall. Amid the whir
of fans and the hum of water pumps, row upon row of racks
stretch into the distance.
Six years ago, I remember a debate over whether, if Mi-
crosoft built a data center that held 28,000 servers, it would be
larger than Google’s, but that debate is ridiculously out of

date. Let’s put this in perspective. Google declines to disclose
how many servers its search engine runs on, lest it set off such
an arms race. As it is, Microsoft boasts that the data center that
it opened in September 2009 in Chicago to support its Azure
cloud, the largest of six data centers that it plans to operate,
will have 300,000 servers. And we know that Yahoo! sorts and
indexes the results of its Web crawls (the process of assim-
ilating all the documents and information on the Web) and
executes other information sorting on an internal cloud of

25,000 servers, and that doesn’t include running its content
Web sites or conducting searches.
Google acknowledged in June 2009 that one of its data
centers held 45,000 servers. I am guessing that Google’s total
reaches 500,000 to 600,000 servers spread over at least 12 in-
ternational data centers, and that may be too low. It has drawn
up a plan that will allow it to manage a million or more servers.

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