{"id":455,"date":"2006-07-12T10:24:05","date_gmt":"2006-07-12T16:24:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=455"},"modified":"2006-07-12T10:24:05","modified_gmt":"2006-07-12T16:24:05","slug":"software_kills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=455","title":{"rendered":"Software kills hardware"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

And so it goes. Software kills hardware. We give it a fancy name – “virtualization” – but it’s just a matter of programming a computer to do what used to require a separate appliance. And as the computer gets more powerful, more and more appliances get sucked into its software.<\/p>\n

In a post<\/a> on Monday, Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz noted how the people who run corporate data centers have had a love affair with special-purpose appliances: “NAS filers, load balancers, storage switches and firewalls, even custom search appliances.” The appliances “solve a specific problem, do so with great focus, and are like novacaine on a technical problem. Have a pain? Numb it with an appliance.” But there’s a high price. The proliferation of specialized gear quickly becomes an economic and operational burden: “Leaving high price tags aside, specialized products typically require specialized skills, customized management or versioning processes, and they tend to be difficult to integrate into increasingly uniform datacenter processes.”<\/p>\n

Fortunately, all that stuff is going the way of the answering machine. The functions are being programmed into computers, which not only saves money but also increases flexibility. Software’s a hell of a lot more malleable than hardware. Schwartz quotes one forward-thinking customer who says that “general purpose [computers] are so fast, we do pretty much everything in software.”<\/p>\n

Where does it end? I was talking recently with Bryan Doerr, the chief technology officer of the hosting company SAVVIS and a guy who’s thought a lot about the implications of virtualization. He suggested that eventually we’re likely see the arrival of what he calls “the virtual data center.” You’ll be able, in essence, to encapsulate in software the configuration of an entire corporate data center. Need to set up a new center? Just run the program.<\/p>\n

And, of course, once the data center turns into software, you can automate its operation and management. And you can set it up wherever you want – on your own computer or on somebody else’s. In the end, it probably just gets sucked into the network. Like the answering machine.<\/p>\n

Software kills hardware. Think about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}