I was reading some article about how facebook designed their new data center. The photo of their data center suddenly reminded me the company I worked for more than 10 years ago: Terraspring.
Terraspring was ahead of its time. What did we do? We did utility computing. All the resources (compute, storage, network) in a data center can be put into a pool managed by Terraspring, they can be dynamically allocated, and users are only charged by their usage. Does it sound familiar? Yes, many of the ideas are now part of the cloud computing.
Our original plan was to build our own data centers and provided services to other companies. As the 2000 internet bubble busted, the demand for data center went for a nose dive. We were forced to change our business model to become a software provider. That didn't went well either. Soon we were sold to Sun Microsystems and the whole team disbanded in 2004*.
Looking at this new wave of data center boom, I was reminded one comment I heard from this week's Big Data Analytics Conference. Somebody asked the panel speakers what's their advice for building a successful company. One of them replied that you didn't have to start from the bleeding edge. That's too risky. You should start from the cutting edge. That's good enough**. When Terraspring started in late 90s and built its data centers, it was on the bleeding edge. Nobody ever heard of utility computing, nor did the market exist. Would our fate be different if we started at a different time or lasted a bit longer? I wish I knew.
*Interestingly, that's also about the time Amazon started their AWS effort.
**But you also have to move really really fast.
Terraspring became part of Sun's N1. On slide 35 you can still see the name Terraspring.
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