Computing on the Grid
Interesting post by Lorcan Dempsey on moving computing infrastructure to the “grid” in much the way we do with electric utilities now. A great takeaway quote:
They (libraries) spend too much time getting their systems to work, and not enough time putting them to work.
As an example, a huge chunk of OhioView’s funding went to building out infrastructure both at the library level and the federal level. One of the great presentation slides I saw from that process was the before and after shots of USGS EROS Data Center. The before picture showed an empty data center room. The after photo showed the same room just crammed full of servers.
I wonder what we could have done in 1997 with a cooperative agreement with Amazon for discounted S3 storage and compute power from something like Google Maps.