RAD Lab is Creating a Datacenter Operating System
Their vision: Enable one person to invent and run the next revolutionary IT service, operationally expressing a new business idea as a multi-million-user service over the course of a long weekend. By doing so we hope to enable an Internet "Fortune 1 million".
How? By wizardry in the form of a “datacenter operating system” created from a pinch of "statistical machine learning (SML)" and a tincture of "recent insights from networking and distributed systems." But like most magics it's not so outlandish once you understand it:
The only new part would be the SML. All the rest is fairly standard by now, even if it's not yet available in a nice gift box at a discount store. And I am highly skeptical when people draw a big circle around the really tricky complex bits and say we'll solve all that with "statistical machine learning", but the idea is intriguing.
The dramatic rise of cloud/utility computing makes the personal datacenter idea less appealing than it otherwise would have been. When datacenters were built from scratch by hardy settlers with nothing but flint knives and bear skins, a Datacenter OS would have been very exciting. But now, isn't leveraging multiple clouds a better strategy? After all, the DC OS really just packages best practices. It won't really innovate for you so you aren't gaining a competitive advantage or even a lower cost structure. And if that's the case, wouldn't I rather have someone else do all of the work?
But I have high hopes I'll have my own personal power plant in the near future. Maybe one of the things it will power is my own personal datacenter!
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PS
Is it "datacenter" or "data center"? Both are used and it drives me crazy.