Because SDN runs on commodity hardware, it could translate into siginficant savings for network operators.
The open source software community has traditionally assumed that their software would run on commodity hardware.
But what if the open source community builds products that automate Big Data complexity on commodity hardware?
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Hadoop became a massive data lake that was powered by inexpensive commodity hardware and could scale massively.
For example, Schooner Information Technology has software for database acceleration that makes databases run 8 times faster than typical configurations by using boatloads of flash memory on commodity hardware.
To this end, members of the WEF YGL are creating technology blueprints, which use widely available commodity hardware and open source software as the building blocks of high-performing, cost-effective cloud solutions.
Many SMBs have struggled to adopt big data and private cloud solutions due to lack of in-house skills and expertise to design and maintain commodity hardware-based systems, IBM said in its announcement.
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Even Microsoft is getting into the game with its Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) that enables SQL Server customers evolve their SQL databases to Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture to take advantage of commodity hardware.
The value of the cloud lies in the fact that tasks that used to require an enormous investment in proprietary hardware can now be accomplished cheaply on commodity hardware that may not even be owned by the organization using them.
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First, Web innovators, such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo, have developed a massively scalable storage and compute architecture to manage Big Data: Hadoop, which parallelizes large data sets across low-cost commodity hardware for easy scale and dramatically reducing the cost of petabyte environments.
Samsung seems to accept the commodity nature of hardware and works with it rather than electing to move out of manufacturing.
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PCs opened up the American software market to outside companies and turned the hardware into a commodity.
Apple has a couple structural advantages that distinguish the company from declining businesses of PC hardware makers and commodity cellphone manufacturers, and should help it to maintain its margins.
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The gross profit margins (revenue minus the cost of goods sold) at other hardware makers have collapsed to commodity levels of 30%, but Cisco's have climbed to 70%.
Once thing is clear: once all the technical challenges of grid computing have been overcome, hardware will have become a true commodity.
Hardware has long since become a brutally competitive commodity business.
The role it sees is being the critical hardware provider, adding value to what is likely to be a commodity business by getting into software that bridges the old and new worlds, and services around a few key industries, most likely healthcare and retail.
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