Industry Guru Sameer Tyagi of Sun in his blog commented on an attack on the Sun Niagra chip by HP. I believe that while the conversation was interesting, but a bigger discussion needs to occur…

Spoken like an old school architect. I suggest reading about agile methodolgies and the shared nothing architecture. Architects almost always get it wrong. Requirements (and possibly the entire direction of the business) change and the architecture often becomes obsolete… so all the up front work is wasted.

I remember the old days walking around the Exodus data centers looking at the millions of dollars of equipment (Sun E10Ks, etc) for these startups that had zero users. Most of these companies are dead now. Maybe some of these companies would still be around if they didn’t shoot their VC load on “building a scalable architecture” for an empty, zero traffic site. Perhaps they should have honed in on a good service that provided real value…

here’s my take:
1) Hire really freaking smart people who won’t do retarded things
2) keep your architecture as simple as possible. add complexity when you actually need it.
3) optimize when needed.

If you have good coders and keep it simple, you’ll be able to make the changes for unforseen business requirements/load.

With a good business plan and product companies in these industries are open to such involvement – I can’t believe that it doesn’t happen more often with web 2.0 companies considering that supply of hardware and rackspace are very important parts of the business.

I don’t agree with the 37 signals approach and nor do I believe that close to 100% uptime costs hundreds of thousands of dollars (actually, I know it doesn’t).

I believe today’s 6A outtage has lit a fuse on a gasoline soaked segment of the high tech industry. One that has been doing a lot of good but which has been shown up for the immature child it really is.

That immaturity manifests itself in a failure to recognise the scaling issue. It is why the IBMs of this world earn billions of dollars, trying to hold this fragile beast we call the Internet together. For the sake of those in the real world that have to earn money buying and selling real goods and services that people physically consume in their real lives. Not virtually.

This time around, large corporations that were tettering on the edge of immersing themselves in this ‘stuff’ may well shrink back.

If I’m remotely correct, it will be a sad day.

Companies can only grow their profits either by increasing their revenue or decreasing their costs. WebServers are a fixed costs and as more users join a service they can quickly absorb all the companies capital.

One alternative is to look at a different architecture where the processing power and disk space is distributed instead of centralised. And I’m not talking Ajax here but a truly distributed architecture using the web as a platform and the user’s machine for processing and hosting data.

That’s what we do at AllPeers which means that we can scale infinitly since each new user joining brings his computer power with him.