Chicken Factories and Server Farms
5 years back the Wall Street Journal ran a human interest feature on the Hmong community in Oklahoma, immigrants who'd moved to the rural South as contractors for Tyson (which drops off day old chicks and feed, and then collects them a few months later). Mr Lee barely gets by managing 223,000 chickens and each morning starts by cleaning out the casualties: "Trudging up and down the building -- 40 feet longer than a football field --he scanned for dead and diseased birds, snatching them from the floor and piling them into a plastic pail."
I eat free range, but I'd argue that data centres are heading this way, and should. Google owns well north of a million servers. For anyone with 1000 servers it makes no sense to buy expensive enterprise blades from HP and IBM. Instead you stack 'em high and cheap and you start mapping your power costs and TCO (or in Google's case, install them next to cheap power plants).
It doesn't matter if the servers die, since you'll just distribute your computing power elsewhere, something Cal Henderson of Flickr pioneered. And they don't have to be built to enterprise spec because they are never going to be moved - they'll sit in the same rack until they die.
I'd argue that cold-swap is fine. All hard drives fail but if you have a distributed architecture it doesn't matter if server E7891 dies - you can just clean it out the next morning when you do your rounds.
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo aren't the only ones with a million servers - big web hosting companies are getting up there too and that's where we hope to come in.
You can charge more for dedicated servers but most people who need a web server would be overserved by a power-hungry, expensive, 2U server from HP. Much better to have something that's "good enough", cheap, and doesn't use much power (cheap TCO).
Dell is making a stab at this with a cheap ($600) blade called the XS11-VX8 that uses a 64 bit Via processor (supports virtualization), and has a 3.5" drive. The problem is that if you're carving up a server with 10 users and your drive fails, you're going to have 10 angry customers and the clock is ticking.
Our Virtual Private Server will be cheaper, and have a hot swap chassis (1/2 U) for RAID 1. Drive dies and the clock isn't ticking except for you to replace the drive. Which you do, because otherwise you'll have ten angry customers.
S2 will be single core, 2GB RAM, dual disk and Gb lan.
S8 will be dual core, 8GB RAM, dual disk, and 3Gb Lan.