Scoop! Google is considering outsourcing some of its IT infrastructure
I had an interesting chat last Friday with John Loiacono, Sun's software chief. Sun's software is the way it sells hardware and it is the hardware that is very interesting because Sun is very focused on lowering electric power consumption in the huge data centers of tomorrow, which will have hundreds of thousands of servers.
During the chat I asked him if someone were to try to build another Google, with its focus on inexpensive grids of PCs, could it be done more efficiently today using Sun's systems?
"Definitely, and we have systems running over there (Google) right now," he said. He also said that Google is thinking about whether it wants to be running its own data centers and developing its own software.
He added that Google created its own operating system to run its grids. And now there are some within Google that question whether they should continue doing that, especially since there is so much open source software, and middleware available (from Sun, of course :-) and increasingly, specialist grid builders.
He suggested that Google might outsource some of its infrastructure in the future, which would make sense if grid computing and utility computing take-off. After all, a machine cycle is just a machine cycle in the world of web services--it is what you do with it that counts--not the fact that you own and manage the infrastructure.
Here is my interview with Mr Loiacono on ZDNet:
I'm in a small, daylight filled conference room in Building 10 in Sun Microsystems Menlo Park campus with John Loiacono, head of Sun's software group. We've just met and sat down but he springs back up and walks over to the whiteboard, "let me just show you something . .."This is normally not a good sign...
