I just got out of the panel on commodity hardware and did not get a chance to participate so here’s my take on it.
The panel started with an opening question: google, amazon and the likes run at a huge scale on commodity hardware, yet enterprise vendors still push customized hardware and expensive at that.
To me the answer is pretty obvious: enterprise hardware is being for the most part sold to people who don’t know how to architect and design software on a commoditized stack. Let’s be honest, look at most “enterprise” hardware/software literature: it’s just noise and a waste of both the writer’s and the reader’s time. And by stack I mean from the server, all the way up to the application code.
If you constrain yourself to buy servers that cost no more than $5k, buying high-end database software makes little sense. Rather you recognize that low-end compute is how you get economies of scale and you apply the same reasoning to your networking gear, storage systems, database software, load balancing software, etc.
Google, from its earlier papers, seems to be the first to have understood that, rejecting the usual marketing garbage from large vendors. And for that we should be grateful.
