Applicability of "Google’s three rules"

Robin Harris wrote about "Google's three rules" for the data centre, in short they are:

1. Be cheap
2. Embrace failure
3. Architect for scale.

Great rules and they appear to be working well for Google. Does that mean that your organization should adopt the same rules? Not necessarily. As you read through Harris' discussion a couple of key success factors jump out at me that I suggest are pre-requisites of the Google approach.

1. "Free or home-made software": If you are paying license or support fees for the software you are running that has a huge impact on how you approach provisioning. For many Enterprise Data Centres (EDCs) I would expect that they have already discovered that the cost of the software stack can easily exceed the cost of cheap servers several times. That is very much approaching Gates' "hardware will be free" prediction. Schwarz said a similar thing as well. What remains that drives cost is the software stack, and if you want to put large multipliers in front of that cost, then it has better be a small number.
2. "Google hired some of the best minds in the business": rather than investing in software licenses or expensive hardware, they are investing in brain power. It seems to be a reasonable approach to me? Have they figured out how to scale brain power? Certainly there are lots of untapped talent around the world that should satisfy demand for a while - how long depends on how many companies take the same approach. The more significant limiter is not supply but rather their ability to manage the bureaucracy that will evolve. But this is not about Google, but your organization. Can you acquire brain power and scale it?

I am not saying the Google's approach is wrong - but if you don't satisfy those pre-reqs and forge forward with their approach, you will have problems. Lots little and yet expensive problems called servers.