Data Centre in a box

The New York Times has this story about Sun's new offering - a datacentre in a box. Google has been doing this internally for a while anyway and it seems like a reasonable idea to try out.

The key proposition is of course how to scale quickly and I guess the appeal is obvious for large companies experiencing rapid growth. Are there enough of these to justify this as a product line ? Time will tell.

What has surprised me is the lack of emergence of the remotely hosted, massively distributed, cheap hardware based infrastructure at a large enough scale that Enterprises can simply provision capacity at will. My view is that something will emerge in this space in the next 5 years - essentially the google infrastructure for Enterprises. I am convinced there is value in it.


The problem is no one apart from Google has been able to master this at the moment and their business model does not evaluate offering their low cost/large scale computing power to Enterprises ....yet. They are moving in this direction with consumers already and it shouldn't be long before they or their competitors realise that the storage and information processing needs for most enterprises are an extension of end user needs that they currently deal with.