Jason Hoffman and I were chatting about the recent patent granted to Google for what is being characterized as a “data center in a box”. But if you dig into the patent, one reads:
…an interconnecting module to interconnect a plurality of the modular computing modules…
So is it Sun’s Blackbox (among other incumbents)? Or a network switch?
5 Comments
This is the second reference indicating that Google’s patent is Sun’s Black Box. But how can they get a patent on something that exists? So perhaps it is a switch as you say or something else…
A perfect topic for the podcast, I need my dose of The Rock. You guys need to shut up and let Ben talk. A google rant would be apropos.
The analysis of any patent must include an in-depth review of the claims. Look at the discussion of the claims for the Google data center patent on PatentFizz (here: http://www.patentfizz.com/fizzdisplay.php?patno=7278273 ). The patent does cover a mobile data center built on a shipping container platform…but it appears to be different than Sun’s Blackbox at least because it requires a separate shipping container that houses the cooling system.
Whereas once Amazon only provided horizontal scaling with EC2 … it looks like Amazon is provide both horizontal & vertical scaling with the public release of EC2.
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/ann.jspa?annID=241
Am I correct in my understanding that the only thing Amazon EC2 doesn’t have over Joyent Accelerators is the ability to hardware load-balance the instances?
@Tim, they’re still not persistent, they won’t ever have the instrumentation capabilities we have with DTrace and other Solaris observability tools, while S3 is nice it is not “normal” POSIX storage, and if you look at people using it in the “real” world you’ll find yourself somewhat shocked by the relative instability of the instances.
That’s just a few things to mention.