Behind popular web services such as Facebook, Google and Amazon’s AWS are racks and racks of computers serving up millions of pages or providing raw computing power. The use of thousands of servers to deliver one application or act as a pool of computing resources has changed the way that chipmakers and computer vendors are building their products. It has also led to the rise of the mega data center.

Intel estimates that by 2012, up to a quarter of the server chips it sells will go into such mega data centers. Dell, which nearly two years ago created itsData Center Solutions Groupto address the needs of customers buying more than 2,000 servers at a time, now says that division is the fourth- or fifth-largest server vendor in the world. In the meantime, suppliers are creating product lines and spending money on R&D to adjust to the needs of these mega data center operators, as those operators are fulfilling an increasing demand for applications and services delivered via the cloud.

Themega data centers running computing cloudsare becoming more distinct from both their corporate cousins, which have to run multiple applications, and the high-performance computing systems that combine multiple CPUs with expensive networking equipment. In awebinar held Wednesday, Russ Daniels, CTO of Cloud Strategy Services at Hewlett-Packard, explained some of the differences to one of the company’s customers.

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