| Sumario: | Computing is supposed to be the ultimate form of automation, but data centres can be surprisingly busy with people. When an application has to be updated or a website gets more visitors than expected, system administrators often have to install new programs or set up new servers by hand. This can take weeks and often turns out to be more complicated than expected. Google's data centres, however, look deserted most of the time, with only about 30 employees to look after a total of 54,000 servers, according to some estimates. This is in part because machines doing searches need less care than those running complex corporate applications; but more importantly, the firm's programmers have written code that automates much of what system administrators do. It can quickly change a computer that sifts through web pages into a server that dishes up search results. It all goes to show that another law in computing, proclaimed by Gordon Bell, another greying industry legend, still holds true: in IT, the dominant platform shifts every ten years or so. Mainframes, minicomputers, PCs and servers are likely to be followed by a grid of computers, either within a data centre or as a disparate collection of connected machines. The network will at last be the computer, to paraphrase a slogan coined by Sun Microsystems. Machines will no longer simply be attached to a network: instead, the network will allow them to act as one. Yet this new platform, which computer scientists like to call "grid computing", is less about replacing old technology and more about managing the existing gear--another sign that IT is maturing.
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