Forget IBM, HP And Sun In Grid Computing: How About Google And Akamai?

from the is-there-anyone-who-doesn't-compete-with-Google dept

In something of an update on Rich Skrenta's speculation on Google's power, Simson Garfinkel has written a fascinating piece for MIT's Tech Review discussing whether or not Google will end up competing with Akamai - noting that both have done amazing jobs building massively scalable computer clusters that take a serious beating on the internet and never go down. What I find interesting is that this discussion never gets around to mentioning IBM, HP and Sun - the three companies who are so focused on offering applications on "grid computing" these days. Have Google and Akamai just hurdled well past them? The article admits that the idea of Google competing with Akamai may be a bit far fetched, as both are in very different market spaces right now, but it's still a good way to think about the potential of massively distributed grid computing systems. An amusing side note is the section at the beginning of the article that discusses just how secretive Google is about their capabilities, saying that PR folks go through every presentation and purposely shrink the numbers so as not to reveal anything. As one Google employee explains: "We have 10,000-plus servers. That's plus a lot."

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