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One consequence of IT standardization and commodification has been Google’s datacenter is the computer view of the world. In that view all compute resources (memory, CPU, storage) are fungible. They are interchangeable and location independent, individual computers lose identity and become just a part of a service.
Thwarting that nirvana has been the abysmal performance of commodity datacenter networks which have caused the preference of architectures that favor the collocation of state and behaviour on the same box. MapReduce famously ships code over to storage nodes for just this reason.
Change the network and you change the fundamental assumption driving collocation based software architectures. You are then free to store data anywhere and move compute anywhere you wish. The datacenter becomes the computer...
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