SAST Wingees

Flash back – Grid Architecture and Mintel

My question posed in Sep 2004 – “When will IT departments adopt this idea en-masse” referring to Google’s Cluster Architecture is beginning to get answered:

1. First, Uber-naysayer Nicholas Carr kicked it off with “is the server doomed“.  Vinnie joins in with his opinion and also rounds up other’s opinions in his “hardware as a service” post. (BTW, Vinnie writes some excellent stuff on offshore outsourcing – worth reading if you are interested in that topic.)  As I had mentioned before, you may also want to keep track of Peter Yared and his company Active Grid. “Why Grids Make Sense” is an excellent post by Peter Yared. 

2. On a parallel track, there is an interesting discussion going on about why the Whole Widget makers like Sun, IBM and HP maybe gaining ground on Microsoft and the Wintel camp. I think a grid architecture with open source and commodity PCs as the Grid Server is possibly the only way the developing world can build a world-class server infrastructure in a evolutionary manner. The Whole Widget route is simply too expensive.  

I had predicted when the news about Apple-Intel marriage that Apple will pursue a Mintel strategy to attack the Wintel Software market. Well, Macslash reports that someone has been able to run Mac OS X under VMWare on a Intel box.