Instant Cloud – SSD Bare Metal Servers
Back at the office, we were recently talking about the possibility of really cheap (in terms of power requirement) cloud servers which are equivalent of raspberryPi's with  soldered on flash cards around the 32-64gig range. I'd bet you can pack a shitload of these in a 1U box and still have power and cooling to spare. The only expensive part might be budgeting for all those ethernet ports on the switch and uplink capacity (for bandwidth intensive servers).<p>One of the engineers tried running our server stack on a raspberry for a laugh.. I was gobsmacked to hear that the whole thing just worked (it's a custom networking protocol stack running in userspace) if just a bit slower than usual. I can imagine making use of loads of ultra-cheap servers distributed all around the world... IF the networking issue can be solved.<p>Perhaps the time is right for a more compact and cheaper wired networking solution... maybe limit the bandwidth to 1Gbps but make it ultra compact with much cheaper electronics. Sigh... a man can dream.