If you've been reading my blog, you know that I'm a big fan of The Register. They seem to be on top of pretty much any technological subject and I can depend on them to provide the most current information on what's going on in the IT industry. I ran across a post that discussed what Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopdoulos has termed as "Red shift" applications.
These are applications "whose requirements for compute power exceeds Moore's Law, in these markets, customers are running out of data-centre real estate, power and cooling infrastructure." Sun has published a whitepaper on this subject, but only the first section truly discusses Red Shift, while the rest concerns Sun's new Datacenter Express Service (DES). For anyone not familiar with Moore's Law, this is the prediction that every two years the number of computing transistors per square inch is doubled on an integrated circuit, which can be interpreted as doubling the compute power for that circuit.
In the whitepaper, Mr. Papadopdoulos is predicting that the demands for certain applications will far exceed the computing power available in today's data centers and these Red Shift customers have the following characteristics:
ΣBW (Sum-of-Bandwidth)
Companies who are driving heavy Internet traffic. This includes popular web portals like Google, Yahoo and MSN. It also includes telecommunications, television over IP and online games.
High Performance Computing (HPC)
Companies doing complex simulations such as weather, stock market or drug design simulations. This is a generally elastic market because businesses frequently spend every "available" dollar budgeted for IT.
*prise (or "Star-prise")
Companies aggregating traditional computing applications and offering them as services, typically in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS). For example, companies deploying CRM solutions are over-served by Moore's Law, but for those companies that aggregate their applications and offer them as a service, such as salesforce.com, are seeing demand growing faster than Moore's Law.
From what I've read, this represents a transition for these customers from dedicated compute resources such as a corporate data center, to what appears to be utility computing. Amazon and Google are expected to be big players in this space with other more traditional providers such as EMC, HP, IBM and Sun vying for a position. Do you think that utility computing will now become a reality? Can Sun compete against companies like Amazon that is already offering this type of service to customers?
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