Wednesday 08 September 2010
Andreas Bechtolsheim, 53, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. where he still consults — knows a thing or two about cloud computing. He’s chief development officer for Arista Networks Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up that supplies networking equipment used to build these massive arrays of computer servers.
Although most have never heard of cloud computing, many do it every day. By uploading photos to Facebook, sending messages via Gmail or playing Club Penguin online, users are accessing programs and software files that are kept far away in cavernous, climate-controlled rooms containing thousands of computers. He also was one of the first people to invest in Google in 1998 when the company was just two Stanford geeks with a laptop. His $100,000 investment in the company started by Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped turn the Birkenstock-wearing engineer into a billionaire. Hollywood uses high-performance clusters to render movies. The advantage of the cloud is that it’s always running and not idle. They get much better utilization.
These computer farms can simulate car crashes, render movies. Facebook also does an enormous amount of computing behind the scenes to generate relevant content to you. That’s what is going on inside the cloud farms. What you see is just what is relevant to you. You get convenience. You don’t have to deal with servers, data storage or big expensive computers. The laptop accesses everything. You don’t have to worry about backup or security; it’s all being handled by the company that manages the cloud.
So people built these dark pages behind the Web page to game the system. As a result, the search results became useless, and doing a high-quality search was impossible. I was just interested in getting better search results. After I heard from Larry and Sergey about their idea, I rushed out to my car to get my checkbook. The company didn’t exist yet. So I wrote them a check and said, “Here’s a check to get you started.”
