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Comment by xtacy | Hacker News Reader

"One size does not fit all." Eventually, we're going to see a heterogenous data centre consisting of machines with different specs, that are suited for different workloads. (minor edit.)

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Hint: The rest of the world already works like that. See: zOS on Power, Solaris on Sparc, HP/Tandem Nonstops (I think are now on x86), IBM i on whatever it runs on, HPUX on x86 (I think), AIX on Power, Linux on Mainframe, Windows NT4, XP, 2000, 2003, 2008 (all running critical tasks)...

Cheap Linux/x86 servers own most of the web space. But the rest of the world runs much more heterogeneously. (And that list above ignores real legacy stuff.. You can buy all of that currently (with the exception of the older windows stuff))

I don't think it's just the web space. Maybe academia's different, but over the past 10 years, a lot of infrastructure we used to use Solaris/Sparc for (and miscellaneous other more exotic things) has all been transitioned to a mix of Linux/x86 and Windows Server/x86--- email servers, compute clusters, payroll, course registration, pretty much everything.

Oh I agree - the general trend is in the direction of win/linux on x86. But it feels like the web world has gone almost exclusively x86. Maybe it's just the web got their quicker -- but acting like linux on ARM is revolutionary is perhaps overdone. (Especially considering Linux runs on x86, x86-64, IA64, PowerPC, Mainframe, Cell, and probably some other processors that are used in datacenters)

The list of supported Linux architectures (form kernel.org):

Although originally developed first for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher), today Linux also runs on (at least) the Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, AMD x86-64, AXIS CRIS, Renesas M32R, Atmel AVR32, Renesas H8/300, NEC V850, Tensilica Xtensa, and Analog Devices Blackfin architectures; for many of these architectures in both 32- and 64-bit variants.

We could also say: pretty much everything under the sun.

Cheap Linux/x86 servers own most of the web space.

oh, and supercomputers: http://www.top500.org/stats/list/35/osfam

We're running HP-UX on PA-RISC and AIX on RS64. Don't know whether you can buy these architectures still, but these are real production machines in a datacentre.

The trend has rather been the reverse, with specialized platforms being overtaken by commodity platforms which are better positioned to take advantage of economies of scale. Mostly that's been x86, but for low power applications it's largely been ARM. As power becomes a more important element, and with ARM relatively more performant, I think we'll see an increasing share of it in what would otherwise be x86 territory, but I don't think we'll see real heterogeneity, unless it's a better competitor to either of these.

I see an analogy between x86 and ARM and Porter's generic strategies. ARM is like the cost leadership, with x86 being the differentiation strategy - where the cost is the cost of energy. x86 is able to do a lot more things than ARM, but with higher energy costs. And then there is perhaps CUDA etc. for the segmentation strategy.

I highly doubt it. Having multiple hardware architectures in a datacenter is very costly. One gets better prices buying more items from the same supplier. It's a lot easier to maintain replacement parts/units for 1 architecture. Developing, testing, fire fixing bugs on multiple architectures is slower.

but when you have thousands of machines of each type, perhaps those economies of scale level out a bit

Google would argue with you.

They roll a heterogenous server setup intentionally to minimize impact from hardware faults, bugs, etc. You build your software at a high level where the hardware under is abstracted away.

Google's experience is only directly transferrable if you too are a search engine.

They do a lot more than search, and as far as I know App Engine runs on the same distributed system.

OK, but is your workload like App Engine either? I can tell you right now that mine isn't; we'd grind to a halt if we tried to pass and share as much state as we do on it.

Depends how good of a deal they can offer you. Saving 20% on a fleet of x86 servers is great but over the long term the supplier isn't going to be paying your electricity bills.

Right, but say FB can move 100% to ARM. Unless there are big differences in power consumption per x64/ARM unit in Web, Cashe and DB servers.

The heterogeneous nature of a data centre has really come to an interesting crossroads. If you pay attention to the mainframe world (and let's face it, nearly no one does) you might've noticed that IBM recently announced their new Z system [1] and it had an interesting feature.

Namely, it can run Z books along with POWER7 blades and x86 blades in the same (admittedly very large) box. Basically, run your compute workloads on Power, database on x86, and control on Z. Seems like a pretty good idea to me!

[1] http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/news/announcement/20100722_a...

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