Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The first trend was short-lived but significant. A lot of capacity had been built up in
the previous boom years and suppliers were slashing prices. Millions of miles of fiber
had been laid in the ground and in the oceans to meet the predicted bandwidth needs of
the world. With relatively few customers, telecommunications providers were desperate to
make deals. Similarly, huge datacenter “colocation facilities” had been built. A colocation
facility is a highly reliable datacenter facility that rents space to other companies. Many
colocation providers went bankrupt after building some of the world's largest facilities.
That space could now be rented very inexpensively. While these surpluses would eventu-
ally be exhausted, the temporarily depressed prices helped kickstart the era.
Thesecondtrendwasthecommoditization ofhardwarecomponentsusedinhomecom-
puters, such as Intel x86 CPUs, low-end hard drives, and RAM. Before the advent of the
web,theaveragehomedidnothaveacomputer.ThepopularityoftheInternetcreatedmore
demand for home computers, resulting in components being manufactured at a scale never
before seen. In addition, the popularity of games that required high-end graphics, lots of
memory, and fast CPUs was one of the major drivers toward making increasingly higher-
end devices available in the consumer market. This mass production led to commoditiza-
tion and, in turn, lower prices. The price of home PCs came down, but servers still used
different components and remained expensive.
The third trend was the maturity of open source projects such as Linux, Apache,
MySQL, and Perl. The rise of Linux brought a UNIX-like server operating system to the
Intel x86 platform. Previously systems that used the Intel x86 chips could not run server-
class, UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. SGI, IBM, Sun, and others did not make
their operating systems available for the x86. Intel x86 computers ran Windows 95 and
variantsthatwerenotdesignedasserveroperatingsystems.EvenWindowsNT,whichwas
designed as a server operating system, did not achieve success as a web service platform.
There were also free versions of BSD UNIX available for x86-based computers at the
same time. Eventually, however, Linux became the dominant x86 UNIX because various
companies like RedHat offered versions of Linux with support. Corporations had typically
shied away from free open source software, because it was not supported. These compan-
ies were slowly persuaded that commercial versions of Linux were acceptable for servers,
because they could still buy support. Even though they were still paying for the OS and
support for the OS, they realized significant cost savings through the use of cheaper x86
hardware and reduced OS costs.
AlthoughLinuxwasavailableduringthefirstwebera,itwasnotmatureenoughforpro-
ductionuse.Infact,toolslikeLinux,Apache,MySQL,andPerlwereconsideredtoyscom-
pared to a Solaris OS, Netscape web server, Oracle database, Java “stack” or a Microsoft
NT Server, IIS (web server), and SQL Server database and .NET environment. Even so,
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