Hardware as a service?

Paul Strassmann describes in a presentation Google's infrastructure made up of thousands of commodity X86 chips.   Nicholas Carr takes the argument further and asks if the large branded enterprise server days are numbered.

Just like incumbent software vendors have not been too excited about SaaS and its economics, it make take some new vendors to propose a hardware as a service model.. take the highly scalable and affordable  Google architecture and offer it for sale as Utility computing. Could that vendor be Google itself?

Update: Charles Zedlewski takes on Nicholas Carr. Argues that grids only do well with parallelizable applications - which we have few of today. See also comments where I point out that other factors like Chiness competition, open source etc will continue to drive server pricing downwards.

Comments

[Dennis Howlett]

Isn't that what the Living dead most fear? Strassmann's video is defintely worth the viewing - interesting aside in there: 'Google may fail.'

[Dan Ciruli]

When Google and Sun announced their mysterious partnership in November, this is what I thought immediately. (I blogged about it here http://westcoastgrid.blogspot.com/2005/10/not-done-googling-after-all.html ). Google has an OS and toolset for distributed computing. Sun has been (trying to) sell computes-by-the-hour for a while now.

This could be just the kind of thing they're doing (though how it relates to the newer news about chip manufacturers is beyond me)...