Tom's plumbing has a quick look at the changes being seen in the datacenter as more and more companies embrace a Web 2.0-style approach to hardware. So far, with Google leading the way, most companies have opted for a commodity server setup. HP and IBM however are betting that an even better setup exists and are striking out to find it. "IBM's Web 2.0 approach involves turning servers slantwise and water cooling the rack so you can do away with air c/a entirely. HP offers petabytes of storage at a fraction of the usual cost. Both say that when you have applications that expect housewares to fail, it's worth designation systems that make it easier and cheaper to deal with those failures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Read the rest here

Mark