I'm not much of a hardware geek these days. For the most part I just want my computers to work. Actually if I think about it, I really just want my services to work. I don't care what specs they have, or the technology used.
If I went back to managing databases, I would be looking for databases to work on, not individual machines. I think that's one reason that the idea of cloud database services appeals to me. Not necessarily clouds on the Internet, but as a series of machines in my data center that I could just plug together and have SQL Server run various services across them.
In reading a little about eBay and their new data center, I think it might be very cool to work there. The director of their data center talks about living Moore's Law, with the new data center in Utah. While I'm sure many of the large internet companies like Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, etc. would also be interesting, I'm not sure how many of them are on a two year cycle, replacing all of their systems on a rotating basis.
I live on a 35 acre ranch, and it's a lot of work keeping it up. That can help me appreciate the scale of the new eBay data center, which is a 60 acre campus. Their phase one approach has 7.2MW of server load in the building with some racks generating over 30,000W of heat. That's quite a hot aisle!
At that pace of change, I have to think that it's both exciting and a challenge to keep systems running on new hardware and also modifying code to take advantage of the new capabilities offered by hardware changes. It's a challenge that I would love to tackle at some point in my life.
Steve Jones
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