Dedicated Servers are Like Answering Machines

A few weeks ago, I came across Nicolas Carr's blog post on how software kills hardware:

Consider the telephone answering machine. It began as a bulky analogue box running spools of tape. It turned into a small digital box, often incorporated into a phone. And finally it disappeared altogether, turning into pure software running out somewhere on a phone company's network. Once you bought an answering machine. Now you buy an answering service.

I've re-read it several times since; it's made me think that sooner or later, we're bound to reach the same point with web hosting.

Today, web hosting customers lease dedicated servers (or fractions thereof). As with answering machines, each of these boxes offer a finite amount of storage space. And each can only handle so many concurrent sessions. Tomorrow, users will expect on-demand hosting resources with seamless scalability. Heck, forget about tomorrow. Amazon.com's storage utility has been up and running for several months, and SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill calls it the Holy Grail.

(Fun fact: SmugMug's users have uploaded 500 million photos, which take up 300 TB of space. Don says that Amazon's pay-per-use rate of $0.15 per GB - redundancy included - has saved him buckets of cash.)

Anyway, through Vlad Miloushev's comment on Nick's post, I learned about 3tera. Its software promises to turn commodity servers into a shared grid on which applications can scale from a fraction of a server up to the whole grid. The requirements for geting started are minimal: a gigabit switch and two or more P4 servers with 1+ GHz processors. What data center doesn't have an idle stash of such gear??

I also followed Dan Ciruli comment ("hardware eventually breaks; software eventually works") to DigiPede, which makes distributed computing software for Windows.

Shouldn't more hosting providers be investigating solutions like these?

Because you can soup up a dedicated server with faster processors, bigger hard drives, more bandwidth; it'd still be tomorrow's answering machine.

You can slash prices; many customers would still end up paying for more hosting resources than they need.

You can install remote reboot switches, promise instant hardware replacement and offer automated OS reloads; these are supposed to be appealing features because they minimize downtime, but what site owners really, really want is a hosting infrastructure that automatically handles hardware failures without losing data or disrupting applications. And that's exactly what 3tera says its software does.

Of course, many answering machine manufacturers have continued selling their products long after software-based voicemail's mass adoption. Even now, you've got several options to choose from on Radioshack's website.

But this week everyone's talking about T-mobile's upcoming UMA service, which will support metered calls through its regular cellular network as well as flat-rate calls via WiFi. BusinessWeek, in particular, predicts that UMA will open the floodgates on landline-to-wireless migration: why would consumers pay for separate home phones when they can make high quality, unmetered calls through a device they already own? And once landlines go out of style, people wouldn't even have the option of using answering machines...

By the way, is UMA bad news for Vonage or what?