Your perspective is typical for most software developers, especially ones with enterprise development experience. You see the cost of your laptop or desktop as cheap... But the cloud changes this perspective significantly. A Google datacenter costs about $10M per MegaWatt (MW). Most Google DCs are at least 50MW. That puts the datacenter costs at about $500M, not 10s of Millions. Furthermore this does not include servers, network, and storage. These systems will cost Google about another $10M/MW. A typical Google DC will run well over $1B. Not cheap by anyone's standards... In the cloud, software is constantly redeveloped to make more efficient use of the HW, not the other way around...
Posts by Gregg McKnight
3 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2008
So you want to build the next Google. Who ya gonna call? Er, Big Blue?
HP leads pack with Istanbul iron
Wednesday 3rd June 2009 19:54 GMT

Correction to your article
Timothy Prickett Morgan,
"Unlike the custom boxes made by Dell's Data Center Services (DCS) unit (see and here for examples) or IBM's iDataPlex machines....
FYI. As of January the IBM iDataPlex is a generally available System x product. It is not a custom box.
Thanks,
Gregg McKnight
IBM Corporation