Thursday, September 13, 2007

The future is in Mainframes

OK I made up that title!.

There is lot of talk in the industry on the latest Sun Microsystems CTO's speech on 'Red Shift' that is happening in the industry. According to him, the investment towards hardware infrastructure for web applications is growing. And it is growing to the extent where it is going to exceed the supply generated by Moore's law. He goes on to say, in future, we will need systems that would be massive enough to cater to huge set of end-users, in the scale of Google and eBay infrastructures. The traditional blue shift market - like ERP infrastructure or Wintel infrastructures - are in the mode of server consolidation.

So, if his words to be believed, in future we will need infrastructure that is as massive and as capable as old mainframes....atleast in logical anology.

Couple of thoughts on the same lines:

1. According to Moores Law, there is going to be tremendous demand for new software technologies/multimedia applications that would leverage the abundant power of hardware infrastructure. Hence, if the demand needs to be met, there needs to be software technology innovation that is happening at the pace of hardware innovation.

2. Grid Computing/Virtualization can go a long way to meet the growing demands of infrastructure needs. For example, why would a manager / information worker need to have a a high-end laptop when he only utilizes a quarter of that computing power. Can't he plug-in to the network to utilize the computing power as well?

3. While the Hardware computing power innovation leads to productivity / cost savings, the software innovation would lead to not just cost savings but Growth / New possibilities as well.