Caroline Kennedy

The Pirate Bay, a torrent site that has attracted millions of users by offering a wealth of (often illegal) content, is now at a turning point. With a $3.8 million fine dangling around the neck of the owners and a fresh $7.8 million acquisition by Global Gaming Factory X, announced this morning, the site is about to embrace a legal business model. How well will this work?

According to some users, at least, it won't work at all. Take this comment posted on the site's blog by Mith0s: "I'd say this is the death of The Pirate Bay, if they want to make PirateBay a legit place [...]. That is done by removing all the illegal files (90%+ of the torrents?) And this will make most people go away too."

And here's why: The Pirate Bay (TPB) has more than 6 million registered users, many of whom have a very good reason to keep returning to the site. TPB users regularly share multimedia content that would be otherwise impossible (or very hard) to get legally. A prime example: The X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie, which was available online almost a month before the release in theaters worldwide (albeit the copy was not a final edit).

TPB users also regularly record and re-encoding popular U.S. TV shows such as Prison Break, Lost, and Heroes (just to name a few) and make them available to fans around the world only hours after they have been broadcast on U.S. channels.

Illegal music (in MP3 format mainly) and recordings from films in cinemas only are available on TPB. Illegal software and games, electronic books, magazines, and music videos are also part of TPB offerings. And despite the pending $3.8m fine, The Pirate Bay site is still in full operation.

But, soon, Hollywood will be able to sigh in relief. Global Gaming Factory (GGF) X said, in a statement announcing the acquisition (PDF Link), that it plans to launch new business models that allow compensations to the content providers and copyright owners. The TPB acquisition deal is to be closed in August.

Indeed, there is a big business opportunity for GGF here from the TPB acquisition, as the site has over 6 million registered users and scores massive amounts of traffic (almost 15 million unique visitors in the last 24 hours). But asking money for the content on TPB will outrage its users and will quickly bring the popular site on its knees.

However, with such high volumes of traffic, GGF could generate revenue from advertising on the site. But it's unlikely that this money would cover the charges incurred from selling highly desirable copyrighted material, and that's if the site could get permission to offer the material at all.

If all or most of the copyrighted material on The Pirate Bay (approximately 90 percent of the total files shared) disappears, so, too, will most of the people using the site. And although The Pirate Bay is the largest torrent tracker out there, other similar sites such as Mininova or ISOHunt (to name a few), could quickly acquire TPB's user base.

The explosion of giant Web properties has server vendors building a new kind of machine that is stripped down to the bare essentials and optimized for cost- and energy-efficiency, analysts say.

The latest entry comes from HP, which on Wednesday introduced a line of x86 servers designed for what HP calls "extreme scale-out" environments. The HP ProLiant SL servers have a layout that lets fans run at lower speeds, and omit features that HP says often aren't required by large Internet companies, such as redundant power supplies and advanced management software.

But HP is not the pioneer in this scale-out server market, with companies such as IBM, Sun, Dell, Super Micro, and Rackable offering products of their own.

Each vendor has its own approach, but in general these are "systems optimized for large homogenous application scale-out deployments, an application that spans 1,000 servers," says Forrester Research analyst James Staten. "These are typically things delivered by Web services, or cloud services as the new buzz term goes."

One key factor is recognizing the server is no longer the point of reliability and availability, Staten says. A software layer - such as a virtualization platform - is needed to ensure the application survives the failure of any particular node, and "the server just needs to be as cheap and efficient as possible," he says.

HP claims its new products will let customers "cut acquisition costs by 10% and power draw by 28%, while doubling their compute density." These claims would be hard to verify, because HP has not revealed pricing of the servers.

But customers buying thousands of servers can reasonably expect up-front and operational costs to decline by tens of percentage points, says Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice. Besides improvements in power and cooling efficiency, new servers offered by HP and rivals "strip down traditional high-availability features and management features to optimize the cost and the supply chain for massive build-out," Eunice says.

This approach is similar to the thinking behind blade servers, which eliminate various components to save space and power costs. But these new scale-out servers may be most similar to what Google has built in its own server farms. Google executives recently explained in a blog post that "we strip down our servers to the bare essentials, so that we're not paying for components that we don't need. For example, we produce servers without video graphics chips that aren't needed in this environment."

Because hardware is never 100% reliable, "enterprises spend a lot of time and money on maintenance," the Google blog post continues. "In contrast, we expect the hardware to fail, and design for reliability in the software such that, when the hardware does fail, customers are just shifted to another server. This allows us to further lower the cost of our servers by using commodity parts and on-board storage. We also design the systems for easy repair such that, if a part fails, we can quickly bring the server back into service."

While Google builds its own servers, systems vendors believe there is a great opportunity in selling stripped-down servers to the rest of the Internet world, and perhaps to enterprises running large data centers.

IBM has the iDataPlex, which pushes two racks together, housing 84 servers and lowering costs by letting fans run at a lower speed and sharing power whips and cables. Scaling up simply requires purchasing another double-rack system, but Staten says IBM's approach is limiting in that it uses a unique rack and server form factor, preventing use of third-party hardware.Rackable, which is changing its name to SGI, is in the scale-out market with the ICE Cube containerized data center as well as the new CloudRack C2, a rack of servers designed for high density and energy efficiency.

Eunice says that Sun and Dell offer a few servers designed for large scale-out environments, but Staten points to Super Micro as being the furthest along technologically. Super Micro has built a "jigsaw motherboard" that can be reconfigured based on a specific customer's needs, Staten says.

If a customer doesn't need remote monitoring tools, or PCI slots, those components just get stripped away to reduce costs. "Based on specific requests, [Super Micro] can disassemble and reconfigure those jigsaw pieces into the kind of server motherboard a particular client wants, and then sell it to them in lots of 1,000," Staten says.

The new technologies illustrate the growing importance of the network, rather than the individual computer, Eunice says. With large Web properties buying tens of thousands of servers, they want a hardware design that reduces up-front capital costs and ongoing costs for management and power use. Cisco has recognized that the network and computer are moving closer together with its Unified Computing System, another product that can be seen as part of this trend, he says.

"More and more of IT is becoming networked IT," Eunice says. "More of the applications, more of the services, more of the presentation and access to IT happens over a network."

The IDG News Service contributed to this report.

IEEE, an association of technical professionals, plans to launch a training and certification program in India in tandem with industry and educational institutions, to get around the problem of falling standards at the country's engineering colleges.

Only 26 percent of engineers that graduate in the country can be directly employed for technology services by India's outsourcing industry, according to a joint study by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) and management consulting firm, McKinsey & Co.

But for a few top engineering institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), most of the engineering colleges in the country provide students with mainly theoretical training, and very little exposure to real-life situations, Muriyankulangara V Ananthakrishnan, senior member and chairman of the Mumbai section of the IEEE Computer Society, said on Friday.

As a result, the IT industry has to invest in training engineers before they can start working on projects, he added.

The IEEE plans to introduce through educational institutions its Certified Software Development Associate (CSDA) and Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP) certificates.

These certifications were offered to individuals in India previously, but they were not supported by a formal faculty. IEEE now plans to set up virtual classrooms that will include faculty both from educational institutions and from industry, Ananthakrishnan said.

IEEE's aim is to make Indian engineering education more relevant to industry, he added.

The quality of engineering education in India could further deteriorate, as new engineering colleges are being set up to meet the demand for engineers from the IT industry. It is difficult, for example, to get good faculty, as the best teachers are typically moving to jobs in industry for higher pay, Ananthakrishnan said.

The CSDA is designed for graduating computer science and software engineering students, while the CSDP certification is targeted at mid-career software professionals, IEEE said.