Google joins Open Compute Project to drive standards in IT infrastructure

All kidding aside, if it's a random rare issue (some bit flipped somewhere), chances are that power cycling it may fix the issue (upon initialization). If it's anything more serious, the issue will likely persist, in which case taking the machine out of production is likely the best immediate course of action.

And to your second point, it is interesting that OCP (some of it perhaps influenced by people who had worked at Google and then later worked at Facebook) appears to have minimized some of the advantages Google had, and now they find themselves possibly getting behind (one of the nice things, and bad things, about open projects like this are that you get a lot more resources applied to making things better than one company can muster).

For similar reasons I wonder if ARM will displace x86 if only because there are probably 15 to 20 independent teams of smart people with ARM architecture licenses making better ARM processors, and perhaps 4 such teams at Intel making improvements in the x86 architecture. At some point it seems "open" seems to eventually overwhelms "walled garden." Although I'm totally open to counter examples where that hasn't been the case.

To address your last 'if' scenario - notice that Amazon, as a large online retailer, had a compelling reason to offer up the use of the infrastructure they had to build anyway, which was over-provisioned for most of the year. I don't have numbers, but I would be surprised if Google has anything close to the kind of seasonality Amazon experiences.

Once it became clear that Amazon was onto something with this whole utility computing/cloud thing, the rest had to play catch up, and continue to do so to this day.

And then, not directly, roughly saying that scaling up on cheap commodity type hardware is only possible because of the efforts of Amazon/Google/Facebook.

He doesn't directly compare AWS versus, say Rackspace.

We recently did the math on some cloud database solutions vs. warehousing data ourselves and using Glacier as a last-resort backup. Turns out it's orders of magnitude cheaper to DIY and would remain so unless we needed -- as you say -- a whole lot of burstable compute. In that case we could always upload (or ship) all the data to the cloud if we wanted.

Cloud is cheaper for some work loads and use cases but not others. You have to analyze your own problem and see what works best.

What cloud vendors have managed to do is put a ton of marketing hype out there to the point that cloud has captured the entire discourse. Today if it's not cloud it's not cloud and that means it's not cloud, because cloud. I've heard many stories recently of companies spending 2-4X what they currently spend on IT to put it in the cloud in order to save money. It's hilarious.

You can still get OCP hardware in standard 19" form factors for these environments, but I don't personally see much point in it. You're seriously limiting your vendor and hardware selections, and if you aren't seeing the purported power efficiency gains then it's not worthwhile. The allure of eliminating the pain of classic vendors is still there, but there are paths through the Dell / HP / Supermicro maze that are tolerable without burning it down and going to OCP.

There are other challenges with OCP's overall design in standard facilities beyond the server cabinet level too. Their (optional) battery cabinet design -- where you save on the facility cost by omitting the UPS bank in favor of battery cabinets for every triplet rack -- is explicitly forbidden at basically every top tier datacenter provider that I'm aware of. No batteries allowed on the floor because of the fire suppression system. You can definitely get a provider to build you a room where they'll let you have batteries on the floor, but that is a multi-megawatt sort of problem, not a 50kw sort of problem.