Grid Computing And Internet Services Commodity
We are now working at a project for upgrading some systems in the grid computing paradigm. This paradigm goes really well with the web 2.0 philosophy. For instance, Google got to top at the same time as the wave of computing as commodity. That was the moment when the cost of the usual hardware got to be so low that, by placing them together,it got to replace the supercomputers. And maybe the most important technological advantage of Google is the big capacity of storing/processing plus high availability: that being the Google OS. The ensemble of computers from data centers plus the software that coordinates the leviathan.
On the other side this advantage is kind of passing. We now have grid computing. For which the type of hard you are placing is no longer important. The most known grid service is from Amazon (Elastic), but there are others too. The idea is that every smart little firm or a group of smart kids can now do cool stuff and scale the resources in the mean time with the success. As you probably know the big problem is that of scaling at big numbers of requests/users/processed data. Of course, the problems of grinding big numbers do not completely disappear.
But I should not drag it out: the idea is that in times in which the power of computing will be delivered just like electric power, the innovative idea and its execution are going to count more. You do not have to think at the costs of a hydro power station until you get with the workshop at the dimensions of a big factory and you want to reduce the operation costs.