Google and Microsoft reveal their Data Center Strategy?
December 3, 2007 by Raj Sheelvant
Two recent Information Week’s blog talk about Data Center Strategy for Google and Microsoft. They are aptly titled Google’s Data Center Strategy Revealed and Microsoft Drops Few Data Center Strategy Hints.
Though the titles are provocative, both the blogs provide scant detail regarding each company’s Data Center Strategy. Information has been scarce for a long time regarding how these companies manage their ever growing Data Centers. Not only their current location but also the future locations for the Data Centers are a big secret. Both Google and Microsoft which are locked in a fierce competition closely guard their Data Center Strategy. In the IT world, you cannot get more commoditized than Data Center Infrastructure. From a hardware perspective, you house a bunch of computers together and achieve economies of scale, right? How could firms like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM etc. achieve differentiation with the commodity service like Data Center? This is where I think non technical executives and academicians like Nicholas Carr get IT wrong. Granted, the hardware underneath the computing power in the Data Center is the same in all the organizations. But, the combination of hardware and software solutions like data caching algorithm, data retrieval and storage algorithm that sits on top of that ‘plain vanilla’ hardware provides the Differentiation. Every firm has a proprietary solution to make data storage, retrieval and search faster and that provides a competitive edge. For example in the book Google’s Story there is an account of how Larry Page and Sergey Brin initially ‘rewired’ throwaway computers at the Stanford campus to manage their ever increasing storage needs. That ‘rewiring’ (i.e. combination of hardware and software solution) is the secret sauce that gives the firm their competitive advantage. Every one of the above mentioned firms have allocated huge R/D resources to tweak their ‘secret sauce’ to gain milliseconds in performance.Even though hardware behaves like a commodity product, the ‘value added’ services on top of it will continue to provide the much needed differentiation. Nicholas Carr’s vision that IT will soon begin to behave like Electricity (that’s how he compares IT in his Harvard Business School Case titled IT Doesn’t Matter) might never come to fruition.
Microsoft or Google or any other firm will never reveal their Data Center Strategy!
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