Slashdot Mirror
What Web 2.0 Means for Hardware and the Datacenter
Tom's Hardware has a quick look at the changes being seen in the datacenter as more and more companies embrace a Web 2.0-style approach to hardware. So far, with Google leading the way, most companies have opted for a commodity server setup. HP and IBM however are betting that an even better setup exists and are striking out to find it. "IBM's Web 2.0 approach involves turning servers sideways and water cooling the rack so you can do away with air conditioning entirely. HP offers petabytes of storage at a fraction of the usual cost. Both say that when you have applications that expect hardware to fail, it's worth choosing systems that make it easier and cheaper to deal with those failures."
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/servers-hp-ibm,1937.html
The best way to organize your serverroom for web 2.0 compliance is by stacking the servers diagonally. This way, air can float freely between racks, improving the flow of the system administrator gas based bowel attacks.
Don't bother with those 10Gb switches, just hook it all up on wireless. Wireless network, wireless fibre storage, wireless power! Your megaflops (the rate at which a million projects per second will turn out to be a flop) will increase by a factor of 213% per watt.
Web 2.0, the best thing to happen to your serverroom since buttered toast and angry system administrators, can be yours now only for $ 9999,95 per diagonal server! Why go for a 1U server when you can have a 2U for three times the price. Call now, and receive a free "My other server is a web 3.0" bumpersticker which will be applied by an angry salesman who'll also slash your tires for FREE!
Warning: servers may not be stacked diagonally on top of eachother, rather rammed into your rack repetetively by an angry monkey (which we've nicknamed "Bob the technician"). Aforementioned technician may or may not leave presents in your servers. Do not feed Bob during the installation process, nor introduce Bob to small children and pets.
This is Web 2.0 we're talking about here. You don't need any links! :)
This seems like a good opportunity to mention the famous Web 2.0 FAQ by Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka on somethingawful.com. For those readers who are not entirely sure what web 2.0 is:
Question: What is Web 2.0?Answer: Web 2.0 is a combination of Web 1.0 and being punched in the dick.
Question: How do I know I'm using a website / service / product that is officially "Web 2.0" and not actually "Web 1.0" with various patches and enhancements added to it?Answer: Web 2.0 is made obvious by the addition of completely and highly unnecessary bells and whistles that don't do anything besides annoy you and make life more complicated. If Web 1.0 was the equivalent of reading a book, Web 2.0 is reading a book while all the words are flying around and changing pages as the book rotates randomly and sets your hands on fire. Also there's this parrot that keeps on flying towards your head in repeated attempts to gouge out your eyes.
Question: I read about this one website in Wired Magazine. Is that Web 2.0??Answer: Oh definitely. Wired won't even mention Web 1.0 sites. Every single site in their magazine is at least Web 2.0. Sometimes they're even up to Web 45.2 (such as www.ebutts-and-credit-reports-delivered-via-carrier-pidgeon.com)!
Question: My roommate said he "digged" a "wikipedia entry" about "the blogosphere" which mentioned "podcasting" as a viable form of "crowdsourcing."Answer: Your roommate is a faggot. Also, this wasn't technically a question.
Question: What's Web 3.0?Answer: It's a product or service planned on release in spring of 2008, and consists solely of websites enabling the user to create even more detailed Kirby ASCII art. (O'.')-o
There is no direct link to the story because there's no direct link between Web 2.0 and redundant hardware setups.
What?
Unfortunately, there is one single definition of "Web 2.0", and that is the one of the guy who registered that trademark: Tim O'Reilly.
Now I'm not usually one to make a big fuss over using a word wrong, but this one is actually a trademark. Deciding to use it in any other way, is a bit like deciding to call my Audigy 4 sound card a GeForce or an Audi. It just isn't one.
And the extent to which both tech "pundits" and PHBs use it wrong, while (at least the latter) proclaiming their undying love and commitment to it, just leaves the impression that they use it as yet another buzzword. You don't proclaim your commitment to a technology, unless you actually understand what it is, how it can help you, and preferably how it compares to other technologies to the same end. Just going with a buzzword because it's popular, and ending up pledging your company to the camp of such a buzzword, is as silly (and often has the same effects) as making it your strategy to use scramjets in bicycles. Just because everyone seems to love scramjets lately, and you wouldn't want your mountain bike company to be left behind.
To get back to the actual definition of that trademark, it's not even about technology as such. It's about people. It's not techno-fetishism, as in liking cool new technologies for their sake, it's techno-utopianism: the mis-guided belief that you only need to give more internet tools to a billion monkeys, to get a utopia like nothing imagined before. Although said monkeys never created anything worth reading with a keyboard, if it's keyboards connected to the Internet, now that's how you hit a gold mine.
O'Reilly's idea is sorta along the lines of:
- forget about publishing content (e.g., hiring expensive tech writers and marketers for your site), it's all about participation, baby. Let users write your content. Hust put in some wikis and forums, and a thousand bored monkeys will do the work faster, cheaper and more accurate. (People will just flock to offer you some free, quality work, just because they like donating to a corporation, I guess. And if instead you discover comments about how much your company sucks, the CEO's sexual orientation, and his mom's weight, well, I guess it must be true, 'cause collaborative efforts can't _possibly_ be wrong.)
- forget about setting up your own redundant servers or dealing with Akamai, use BitTorrent. (Ask a lot of people how they felt about Blizzard's going almost exclusively through BitTorrent at launch. Nowadays their own servers serve a lot more of the content, if not enough other users are stuffing your pipe. I wonder why.)
- forget selling media on the Internet, teh future is Napster letting people pirate it, like happened way back then. (No, literally, the "mp3.com --> Napster" line is part of his own page explaining Web 2.0. I guess good thing noone told Steve Jobs that.)
- forget content management systems, use wikis. (I wonder in which alternate reality the piss-poor search engines of wikis can be compared to the capabilities of those systems.)
- for that matter, forget about structuring information in any way, like through directories and portals, just let the users tag it. (I'm _sure_ that the tags "humor, theft, oldnews, !news, digg" will so help me find the story about a manager stealing the server from earlier. Never mind that search engines were already dumping searching for tags, in favour of full text search, even at the time when he came up with that idea.)
Etc.
Basically, if you have the patience to sift through his ramblings, and don't give up at the "well, Google started up as a web database" intro, the meat begins at "Harnessing Collective Intelligence". That's what's it about. It's not as much about what technology you use on the web, it's about connecting a billion clueless monkeys, and believing that the result is something a billion times more intelligent and informed. Anything that helps connect those monkeys is good, anything else is irrelevant. Even whether you us
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.