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The Big Question
By John | January 14, 2008
The latest buzz on cloud computing is Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Big Switch.
The Big Switch is, in short, a comparison of the switch to utility computing (cloud) to the switch to utility-based electrical power that happened at the turn of the 19th century. The “Cloud” revolution has without a doubt begun, but the big question in my mind is when or if will the the brick-and-mortar computing centers run by large banks and insurance companies make the switch. I did a post last year that Home Depot built a 158,300-square-foot building in Austin that was supposed to support its computing until 2012. Due to shifts in power consumption, Home Depot will likely run out of power capacity sometime next year. What will it do then, build another data center? Large banks and insurance companies running legacy software face the same issue. Will they make the big switch, or will they continue to build their own? The big switch might not be that easy for companies that run legacy applications. Google, IBM, and Amazon have a big head start. The big switch first starts with applications that are designed in a cloud using technologies like Hadoop based on Google’s MapReduce. At Google, cloud computing is a software development mindset. Amazon wasted no time commercializing these concepts with EC2/S3 offerings. IBM announced its intent to offer the “Blue Cloud” sometime this year, and it has also announced a Hadoop plug-in for Eclipse.
The big question, then, is are the brick and mortar computer centers preparing for the the switch. Do they know? Do they even care? A good friend of mine always says that there is no such thing as standing still: you are either moving forward or backwards because, if you think that you are standing still, you are actually moving backwards.
We can all remember when the Internet first hit the streets the fear of god that companies like Barnes and Noble had to deal with knowing that companies that didn’t even exist yet could put them out of business. Fast forward to July 2007, when Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) became the world’s most valuable bank, overtaking Citigroup. ICCB was founded in 1984, and its infrastructure is mostly Linux based. Will the fear of god hit the brick-and-mortar computing centers when a company like ICCB releases its total IT costs (one-tenth the cost of the BnM) and has better service? News flash: when the mad money guy starts to figure out what Google pays for IT vs. BofA, maybe then Nick Carr’s “Big Switch” will be flipped.
Topics: amazon, barcampesm, blue cloud, cloud computing, ec2, google, hadoop, ibm, mapreduce |
