Santa Clara, California:
Is this Silicon Valley or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?
Over the last 18 months or so, this question has become tougher to answer as a flood of products with names like Voldemort, Hadoop and Cassandra have appeared on the scene.
They are part of a new wave of highly specialized technology -- both software and hardware -- built by and for Web titans like Facebook, Yahoo and Google to help them break data into bite-size chunks, and present their Web pages as quickly and cheaply as possible, even while grappling with increasing volumes of data. Facebook, for example, created Cassandra to store and search through all the messages in people's in-boxes.
The products, championed by a bustling crop of start-ups, reflect a potential changing of the guards here in the technology world's heartland as young companies try to capitalize on radical shifts in the way new and old businesses run.
"There is a foment happening," said Andrew Feldman, the chief executive at SeaMicro, a hardware start-up that hung up its shingle last week. "It's a bubbling of ideas and technology."
In the original dot-com boom, companies tended to buy the fastest, most expensive systems so that they could manipulate ever larger, centralized databases of information. But this approach has proved too costly and cumbersome for the types of work that companies like Google and Yahoo tend to do now.
The focus instead is on taking chunks of information, chopping them up and spreading the data across thousands of computers and storage devices. It's a divide-and-conquer approach to making the avalanche of data produced online manageable.
To complement the changes in software design, some hardware makers have emerged with new kinds of computer systems.
SeaMicro, for example, unveiled a line of computer servers that run on Intel's Atom chips, usually found in hand-held devices and smartphones. Mr. Feldman argued that these chips have enough oomph to display Web pages and handle other basic Internet tasks, while consuming far less power than more muscular chips usually found in computer servers.
Because of some other engineering tweaks, SeaMicro can fill a refrigerator-size cabinet with about 10 times as many chips as a standard computer server system, while saving customers on power and space costs.
"The Internet has brought about a tidal wave of this particular kind of traffic," Mr. Feldman said. "You have to build specialist types of parts to deal with it."
Specialized hardware systems like SeaMicro's, and that of Schooner Information Technology, another hardware start-up, have appeared alongside equally specialized software, like Project Voldemort, Cassandra, CouchDB and MongoDB. This kind of software can arrange and store information without the expensive, traditional databases sold by Oracle, I.B.M. and Microsoft.
Mozilla, which helps produce the popular Firefox Web browser, has to support more than 400 million users of its technology and has found the rising cost of power to run its data centers frustrating, said Justin Fitzhugh, the company's vice president for engineering operations. The company has been testing a SeaMicro system and discovered that it handled lightweight computing jobs well.
"It wasn't feasible 10 years ago to use large numbers of low-power chips because the software to make that work wasn't available," added Bobby Johnson, a director of engineering at Facebook. "We have crossed a point of scale where we have to spread things across lots of small machines to be cost effective."
Schooner Information Technology packs its systems full of the high-speed memory similar to that found in iPods and cellphones to create a type of appliance that can hold huge quantities of often-viewed information at the ready. This lets a company send out prized information from its computer center at a quicker clip than using more traditional techniques that require hunting across slower data storage devices.
Jonathan Bryce, an executive at the Web site management company Rackspace, said that mainstream companies had started to use these new types of technology, particularly the software, as they too became overwhelmed with data.
"We know of a large financial services company using Cassandra to store data produced by their trading simulations," Mr. Bryce said. "They need the same data in London, Hong Kong and New York and could not get this to work with traditional databases."
Stephen O'Grady, a founder at the technology analyst company RedMonk, said the technology industry often has swung back and forth between more standard computing systems and specialized gear.
"Clearly, we are heading toward a specialist period now," he said. "It's part of a trend where thinking in Web scale is starting to become more of a requirement for businesses."
Over the last 18 months or so, this question has become tougher to answer as a flood of products with names like Voldemort, Hadoop and Cassandra have appeared on the scene.
They are part of a new wave of highly specialized technology -- both software and hardware -- built by and for Web titans like Facebook, Yahoo and Google to help them break data into bite-size chunks, and present their Web pages as quickly and cheaply as possible, even while grappling with increasing volumes of data. Facebook, for example, created Cassandra to store and search through all the messages in people's in-boxes.
The products, championed by a bustling crop of start-ups, reflect a potential changing of the guards here in the technology world's heartland as young companies try to capitalize on radical shifts in the way new and old businesses run.
"There is a foment happening," said Andrew Feldman, the chief executive at SeaMicro, a hardware start-up that hung up its shingle last week. "It's a bubbling of ideas and technology."
In the original dot-com boom, companies tended to buy the fastest, most expensive systems so that they could manipulate ever larger, centralized databases of information. But this approach has proved too costly and cumbersome for the types of work that companies like Google and Yahoo tend to do now.
The focus instead is on taking chunks of information, chopping them up and spreading the data across thousands of computers and storage devices. It's a divide-and-conquer approach to making the avalanche of data produced online manageable.
To complement the changes in software design, some hardware makers have emerged with new kinds of computer systems.
SeaMicro, for example, unveiled a line of computer servers that run on Intel's Atom chips, usually found in hand-held devices and smartphones. Mr. Feldman argued that these chips have enough oomph to display Web pages and handle other basic Internet tasks, while consuming far less power than more muscular chips usually found in computer servers.
Because of some other engineering tweaks, SeaMicro can fill a refrigerator-size cabinet with about 10 times as many chips as a standard computer server system, while saving customers on power and space costs.
"The Internet has brought about a tidal wave of this particular kind of traffic," Mr. Feldman said. "You have to build specialist types of parts to deal with it."
Specialized hardware systems like SeaMicro's, and that of Schooner Information Technology, another hardware start-up, have appeared alongside equally specialized software, like Project Voldemort, Cassandra, CouchDB and MongoDB. This kind of software can arrange and store information without the expensive, traditional databases sold by Oracle, I.B.M. and Microsoft.
Mozilla, which helps produce the popular Firefox Web browser, has to support more than 400 million users of its technology and has found the rising cost of power to run its data centers frustrating, said Justin Fitzhugh, the company's vice president for engineering operations. The company has been testing a SeaMicro system and discovered that it handled lightweight computing jobs well.
"It wasn't feasible 10 years ago to use large numbers of low-power chips because the software to make that work wasn't available," added Bobby Johnson, a director of engineering at Facebook. "We have crossed a point of scale where we have to spread things across lots of small machines to be cost effective."
Schooner Information Technology packs its systems full of the high-speed memory similar to that found in iPods and cellphones to create a type of appliance that can hold huge quantities of often-viewed information at the ready. This lets a company send out prized information from its computer center at a quicker clip than using more traditional techniques that require hunting across slower data storage devices.
Jonathan Bryce, an executive at the Web site management company Rackspace, said that mainstream companies had started to use these new types of technology, particularly the software, as they too became overwhelmed with data.
"We know of a large financial services company using Cassandra to store data produced by their trading simulations," Mr. Bryce said. "They need the same data in London, Hong Kong and New York and could not get this to work with traditional databases."
Stephen O'Grady, a founder at the technology analyst company RedMonk, said the technology industry often has swung back and forth between more standard computing systems and specialized gear.
"Clearly, we are heading toward a specialist period now," he said. "It's part of a trend where thinking in Web scale is starting to become more of a requirement for businesses."
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