The punch line of the post: "ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?"

I wonder why he declined to add "... and security" ? ;)

That's a great question that had never crossed my mind.

How do you manage security in cloud? Can you even do it? Because someone else is administrating your servers, they can get access to everything you have. Is there a way around that? Or is there a way to write your applications to be secure even in that environment?

In theory trusted computing can solve that problem but it's not clear that it will ever become practical. I think customers are just going to have to trust the cloud providers.

where I stand, the best price per gigabyte of ram is obtained on dual-socket (8 core) opterons with 32GB ram (16x2gb modules). Right now, ram is my big bottleneck.

most single-socket systems only let you install 8GB ram (4x2gb modules) so I've got to buy twice as many single socket boards to get the same amount of ram. It's ok, I guess if you need more cpu than ram.

The other problem is that you usually have to go to a server-class board to get low-power CPUs. I know of no desktop CPU that can compete with the Xeon L series or the Opteron HE series. (Sure, there are low-power desktop CPUs, but none of them have the performance of the Xeon L or opteron HE. If you know of a quad-core desktop CPU that eats less than 75w I'd be happy to hear about it.)

I'm sure google pays less per watt than I do, but still, if you plan on keeping hardware around for two years, the ongoing cost per watt makes a big difference. Low power CPUs save serious money, even if they cost more up front.

Opteron HE bartons are ridiculously cheap right now. 1.8Ghz quad-core HE processors are around $100 on newegg right now. (2.1Ghz quad-core shanghi opteron HE cpus that you might actually want to use are closer to $300. Still cheap.)

Also, while I agree that you should prepare for any bit of hardware dying at any time, I think technologies like ECC in ram are important so that you notice when your hardware dies. I don't mind a box that is dead. I replace it. It happens. What bothers me is a box that is kindof acting funny. You know, when you can't tell if it is the software or hardware. Sure, you can do some of that at the application level with checksums, but it's difficult to do it at the OS level.

A third of the price for gmail versus other mail providers. That's great, until you can't get to google tech support and you can't get to your email and nobody knows quite why. Sorry, in most organizations, I'll handle my mail myself. gmail's great for personal accounts, but I'm not ready to trust a business to it.

I also wonder how many business are ready to have all of their email communications indexed by Google. Granted, with any third party provider, it's going to happen, but I would at least prefer to keep my eggs in more than one basket.