Cloud Computing: If Hardware is Commodity… Why Are We Still Spending so Much Time on It?

bWe really are moving in the direction of truly commoditized hardware. Some uses will always have specific requirements that are not mainstream and thus will require specialized builds; this is true in every industry. But increasingly, who made your hardware and where they got their parts from is a secondary issue.

Which makes one consider what really sells hardware these days. Years ago when I was working for Network Computing, I reviewed a low-end blade server company capable of cranking up blades at a fraction of the cost of most vendors. They (like far too many good companies) ran out of money before they could grab market traction, but they did show that it could be done at a price even small enterprises could afford…

The cycle in hardware has traditionally been “CPU bottleneck” goes to “Disk bottleneck” goes to “Network bottleneck”. As each is resolved (not necessarily in that order), the next becomes the stumbling block, then we start over again. This is still somewhat true, but an amazing thing happened along the way. We started having more hardware power than software was using. In the nineties I heard a quote from a hardware engineer that was “It doesn’t matter how fast we make it, the software boys will just piss it away”. And that definitely sounded true at the time. But here we are now, and hardware has improved at a faster pace than software has consumed it, except in the areas of Big Data, cloud, and virtualization… and even those are often under-utilized…

Read more from the source @ http://news.sys-con.com/node/3406811