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Sun Plans to Have No In-House Data Centers by 2015
1sockchuck writes "Sun Microsystems wants to cut its IT department's data center footprint in half within five years, and then eliminate in-house data centers completely shortly afterward. 'Our goal is to reduce our entire data center presence by 2015,' writes Sun data center architect Brian Cinque, who says Sun hopes to shift its in-house IT to a software-as-a-service model. Sun will use virtualization and consolidation to reduce its data center space and energy usage by 50 percent by 2013, with a goal of moving it all online two years later. Sun's plan reflects the shift to utility computing discussed in Nicholas Carr's new book, which we debated earlier this week."
Man, if *Sun* can't afford to maintain a Solaris data center, then who can?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
what at this point? and why do we care?
Another initiative from Sun: We would soon all have Net PCs.
No it's eliminate all "in house" data centers. As for net PCs. You'll note a lot of NICs (builtin and otherwise) have PXE builtin or an option
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It all makes sense. No data centers in 2015... none needed if there aren't any employees or products. At the rate things are going, will Sun still be around in 2015?
I read the blog post and the pdf he linked that describes what he means by datacenter - but I don't get it. Where is all their stuff going to run from? Is he talking about just using some other companies data center, or is this some kind of distributed thing where it is all spread out over smaller pieces? He mentions storage- well isn't a room with racks full of disks a data center?
I'm missing something here, so maybe somebody could make this more clear.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
This is nothing new. Political parties have stored their data in out-houses for ages.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
The computers will be in someone's house, just not Sun's. This just means that Sun will be completely out of the hardware business by then.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Sure, Sun won't have any data centers by 2015. Also no finance, or marketing, or r&d or sales, or procurement, or manufacturing or a cafeteria or a mail room..
Sun's plan reflects the shift to utility computing discussed in Nicholas Carr's new book
... good luck with that.
Yes, well
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
U will be assimilated into the one true, gigagargantagoogle corporate data empire.
That's so unfair...swinging a dead cat.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
So, they are going to spin off their data centres into a separate company - that's all.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
We'd be more than happy to take their DC over on our boxes on our site. They're SUN boxes anyhow, if they like. We'll virtualize it and cut it up whichever way they like. We do this all the time.
Imagine no Beowulf cluster of these.
After years of nonsensically muttering "the network is the computer", the marketdroids finally convinced IT that they don't need a datacenter.
There isn't a -1 offensive, but since I'm out of mod points, could someone with some please use the closest equivalent?
People, this is just clever spin. The entire industry is moving towards putting applications back behind the glass (where they usually belong). Sun's got some kickass virtualization tools, and the network is now ubiquitous. All this announcement means is that they're going to cut costs by outsourcing their data centers. Big deal. There will still be data centers, servers, system administrators ... but they won't be at Sun. Lots of companies outsource their data center operation. I oversee network operations for a hosting company in New York state, and I can tell you with certainty that demand for data centers is not slowing down. The applications have to live somewhere. Can you save money by having someone else run it for you? In many cases it makes economic sense, and Sun is going to try it.
Clever spin. See how they made everyone turn their heads and take a curious interest? How much better was that than announcing "by 2015 we're going to fire all our IT staff and farm out the data center ops to some third party" ??
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
They're going to have it all hosted on The Google.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Swinging a live one is a lot less pleasant.
I predict we'll all have Internet in our pockets (yes the WHOLE Internet) by 2055, and I don't mean _access to_ the internet, I mean an entire mirror copy, that I can update daily via my WiFi 802.954z connection that has the range of our entire galaxy and works at speeds of SONet 768000/sec. ... and yes it will run Linux! :P
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
If this idea had of been mentioned at an internal meeting with staff invited to, there would have been lots of yelling and shouting and this guy would have been lucky to survive with his life, never mind job.
Already various parts of the internal network and infrastructure are outsourced and guess what? We, the people who need to develop and be on the bleeding edge get forgotten AND screwed over.
We get forgotten because the percentage of people who need to be able to use IPv6 and anything other than plain IPv4 is not significant compared t the number of sales people and managers and other people who don't care.
And as luck would have it, I'm learning about this *first* via slashdot and not via an internal email.
Perhaps that in itself tells you own confident management is about being able to sell this turd to its employees.
(And just perhaps I should use tor here because "anonymous coward" isn't really anonymous...oh well)
The problem with remote hosting is that there can be some serious lag and capacity issues. I work for a company with sites around the country and it is a major PITA when I have to work through a remote server. I can't imagine having to put up with that crap all the time. There's a reason why thin clients mostly failed.
would SUN want an undetectable In-House Datacenter? And does this explain how the Barron gets one 1000 years before it reappears in Chapterhouse?
I think utility computing is good, virtualization is flexible and nice.
But in the end, all this may result in increased server/hardware prices.
Think about it, mass production of low end servers what reduced the cost of server hardware.
If everyone used utility computing, that might mean less hardware needed and produced which makes it cost more to produce.
That's because they'll all be in the carpark in shipping containers. :)
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
Sun will use buzzwords to reduce its data center space and perceived energy usage by 50 percent by 2013, with a goal of moving it all to India two years later.
There, fixed that for Sun.
First, I would like to point out that providing anything over the internet requires that servers somewhere invariably consume electricity at that somewhere, so relinquishing web services to the cloud does not amount to a smaller overall energy consumption, it just eliminates the evident level of corporate consumption. Granted, they have migrated to more energy efficient equipment thus far, but that does not amount to a hill of soybeans because newer equipment is nearly always more efficient. Top marks for obfuscation.
The proverbial cloud seems more efficient because it consumes precious unused cycles (we recently discussed the value of these), but it could be argued that it: (a) artificially inflates perceived demand for traffic provision over certain ~tubes~ to the computing source, increasing necessary power supply for those paths, (b) increases power consumption incrementally at the point of the processing computer, and (c) via the law of diminishing returns, increases overall resource consumption thanks to the resource cost of transporting the information to less efficient equipment. The processing requirement is not diminished, only distributed and increased through that distribution. How many hops through these abominable "25-50% efficient" data centers before the relatively minuscule reduction in Sun's data centers is met? And what of the jobs lost? And what of the increased commute consumption of unemployed coders and hardware wonks to their stately new stations behind Burger King grills?
We now employ both centralized systems and massively distributed systems to host information we demand, and generally these are selected based on monetary capital versus willingness or incentive to participate, overall robustness being fairly equal. SETI and many other number-crunching projects rely on the generous support of willing software installers to participate in their projects, but if an already stable bandwidth-consuming entity is forced on nearly all consumers of a basic internet need (and their hosts), I think their piece of the system will collapse because the participants will not be so willing! The internet changes rapidly, as many players swiftly respond to changing conditions. We generally have a state of equilibrium, except where governmental players attempt rule changes. When a commercial entity (Microsoft, etc) prods around rule changes, we make major waves. If Sun chooses to put their whole school of thought into this particular sea, I think they'll have plenty of sharks to worry about.
Sun would like to cut the monetary cost of operating data centers, and their chosen method to shove it down our throats is to first douse it with the chocolate syrup of environmentalism. How insulting; do they really think we're that stupid? A forced migration to a new system is pretty retarded in itself, and the trifecta of security concerns, implementation nightmares, and environmental balderdash seems to be suicidal.
Protracting a bit, as a forced (college student) user of Sun products, I would be absolutely resistant to any such environmentally shrouded money grab, preferring the security and stability of normal centralized (particularly open source, mind you) not-for and for-profit entities. I would be very favorable to future competitors of Sun that oppose these vulnerabilities. Finally, I would like to clearly state that I believe this this to be a mere political statement to justify already existent a
FairTax baby!
Remember when third parties were going to buy computing time from Sun?
There turned out to be no third parties who wanted that. What is Sun's answer? Do the exact opposite.
That's right! Sun is going to buy computing time from other people. Their HQ is going to be like a giant Net PC or something. It'll be frickin awesome! And just as profitable as the last initiative was money-losing.
...is "out-house" data centers. Powered entirely by human waste. Very green, very modern, it's recycling for the new millennium.
I think they should first have a working website. sun.com slow as hell and the worse is the "Sun Online Supports Center" which should provide a way to issue a service request. All you can get are timeouts.
So this is all smoke screen?
Seriously though people, do you think the corporate CXOs are really doing hardcore cost-benefit analysis when planning strategic moves like this? As long as the balance spreadsheet ends up looking good, it's all fashion. When outsourcing is in fashion, everybody do so, when utility computing is the fashion, same happens. It's about what the stock holders expect you to do (especially when competitors are doing something new).
What Sun is talking about is absolute BS. System administrators will not become like TV repairmen because companies will not trust to be hosted by some other company.
There are two approaches that corporations take to custom machinery (assembly lines for automated production). The first is that they get the machine builder to build and install the line. Then once the assembly line has been installed the local maintenance staff is trained to repair and manage the machines.
The second approach is that the company gets a custom machine built, and then they rely on service from the company. But in this situation that usually means having a guy from the machine company sit in an office of the company that uses machine all day long waiting for something to go wrong.
My point is that if Sun wants to go route 2, fair enough, but the sysadmin will still exist because I don't see little munchikens running around doing the job. What Sun is promoting is the rearranging the deck chairs! And I fail to see how this will improve the overall situation. Oh yeah I forgot Sun is IRRELEVANT and thus rearranging the deck chairs makes them relevant again! [/sarcasm]
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Sun is probably not going to be around in 2015 anymore anyway.
What's this site full of T2000s that I'm working on then?
Sun probably won't have any datacentres of their own, but they have been moving away from that for a very long time. In the UK they rent space from AT&T for small projects, and the capital projects where they partner with BT are hosted in BT-owned centres. In the meantime their offices like the UK HQ are empty.
Virtualisation and utility computing are buzzwords in the business, and a lot of companies are going for the virtualisation aspect, which means that Sun sell some more T2000s and 5120s but they're a way from getting any utility sites working, at least in Europe, as yet.
So there is presumably a lot of mileage in building secure data center facilities near large water flows, rather than in, say, somewhere like Phoenix where lots of power is needed to remove the heat. Much easier to outsource the datacenter than to relocate the company. Perhaps we should conclude that someone at Sun has seen where power costs are going and got a clue.
Rolls-Royce builds what are possibly the best generators in the world, but they don't use them to run their plant. Someone else buys and operates them and, guess what, they buy electricity back from a variety of sources. There seems, on the face of it, no reason why Sun should not do the same with compute capacity.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
thats right ! i got rid of all my sun servers from my datacenter years ago and replaced them w/ ibm's running linux.
all i can say is sun you are on the right track and you should have done this years ago.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
And not because of the 'dogfood' thing; Sun just shouldn't make any plans that they can only harvest on in seven years. Seriously, 2015 ? Who knows whether Sun will be around in 2009 ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I was commenting on the weirdness of the article referenced by Slashdot:
..."
""Did I just say 0 data centers? Yes! Our goal is to reduce our entire data center presence by 2015," writes Brian, who says the goal will be to reduce data center square footage by 50 percent by 2013,
How is this news? Everyone in the world is doing the same thing.
More of what everyone is doing:
"The project consolidated 2,200 servers into 1,000 energy-efficient servers and reduced the number of storage devices from 738 to 225. Compute capacity grew by 273 percent, storage capacity increased by 373 percent, and power usage plunged from 2.2 megawatts to 560 kW."
The whole article is reminiscent of the huge "Net PC" publicity perhaps 8 years ago. After all the writing, nothing unusual happened.
It seems as though Sun's publicity if driven by people with no technical knowledge, and no interest in technical knowledge. "Saas" is a big thing with non-technical people now: "... followed by a two-year process of shifting Sun's IT operations to a software as a service (SaaS) model."
Do you really think that Sun will switch every employee to having all software they use on some remote computer? And in 2 years? "Saas" seems to be big in the minds of non-technical people, apparently because they can understand it with no thinking.
I wonder how many Sun Microsystems employees ever got Sun JavaStations, which was Sun's entry in the Network Computer baloney?
..."
From the Wikipedia article: "Production models comprised: * JavaStation-1 (part number JJ-xx), codenamed Mr. Coffee: based on a 110 MHz MicroSPARC IIe CPU,
Larry Ellison of Oracle started it: Larry Ellison and the Network Computer that Wasn't. (It was 13 years ago, not 8, as I said earlier.)
"Network Computers" were computers for other people, not the people who were talking: "There would only be rudimentary software and memory on the Network Computer. Most software and serious memory would be out there on the Net where it could be easily maintained. The system would run on Java and use Oracle databases."
It seems to be some kind of shared craziness. "Marketing" people get excited about something they think they understand, and they pay magazines and newspapers to run stories. "No In-House Data Centers" and "Saas" is part of the same "Network Computer" nonsense, recycled.
Only faster. I plan to have no in-house data center by 2009! I could also do it by tomorrow, but saying 2009 allows room to do even better than I promised.
And EDS, in turn, contracts out much of the support.
EDS handles sun datacenters all over the world. Moving offshore is nothing new for Sun/EDS, they have been doing it for years. So the physical machines will be hosted somewhere else? Meh.
Sounds like a really lousy job, everyone else's data all the time.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I keep reading all these comments about moving entire companies' worth of systems to a co-lo facility.
And, setting aside the question of reliability of the uplink [yes, Virgina, backhoes - not to mention tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes - do take out fiber optic lines every now and then], and setting aside questions of privacy [do you really want God only knows whom to be able to sniff your company's email traffic?], then what about the fact that you're dealing with a single point of failure?
What if there's a fire at the co-lo?
Or, God forbid, what if some of these terrorists were to wise up and go after a really important piece of command and control infrastructure?
There's a certain high-rise building [or cluster of buildings] in the western United States, sitting on a thoroughfare which rhymes with "Bilshire Woulevard", which, if it were taken out, would put an immediate end to all economic activity in a region with the 7th largest GDP in the world.
Do you really want all of your sensitive info co-lo'd at a single site which is one good ammonia-fertilizer truck bomb [not to mention EMP weapon] removed from vanishing into thin air?
I think the writing is on the wall that system administrators are going to go the way of the tv repairman.
I agree with you that certain aspects of today's IT infrastructure could be commoditized.
For instance, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Google have long since proved that basic email functionality can be easily commoditized.
And Exchange Server backend [with Outlook frontend synchronization], while maybe an order of magnitude more difficult than basic email, could, in many cases, probably be commoditized [assuming you're that one-in-a-million business wherein there is no information of any monetary value which could be gleaned from snooping around in your Exchange database].
But the more specialized your IT tools become [which, generally speaking, is to say: THE MORE VALUE IS ADDED BY YOUR IT TOOLS], the more difficult it will be to commoditize them.
So, as always, the secret to job security will be in specialization - it won't be enough anymore to be just a general systems administrator - you'll have to specialize in e.g. Data Base Administration. And then it won't be enough anymore to be a general DBA - you'll need to learn specific schema & business logic suites, from the likes of Siebel/PeopleSoft/SAP/etc, or you'll need to learn specific data-mining techniques, from the likes of SAS/Ascential/Informatica/etc.
Which, of course, is the way it's always been: If you want absolute job security, then you need to be able to provide a service which no one else is capable of providing.
PS: There's another way to build job security, which is to shave, put on a coat and tie, and get out of the server room and meet some of the other people in your company. [And for some of you guys, it probably wouldn't hurt to lose 20 or 30 lbs, and to bathe and use deodorant on a regular basis.]
Learn how to give a good firm handshake, how to tell a joke [or, better yet, how to LISTEN to a joke - and even chuckle at it when it's not funny], and get in the habit of performing lots and lots of IT handholding: guiding your users through their software, teaching them its ins-and-outs, showing them that - lo and behold! - the little feature which they always wanted was there in the software already, getting the reputation for being that indispensable guy who always seems to be able to solve the problems which no one else can solve...
...moving "human resources" overseas...
Wouldn't it be the ultimate in outsourcing if HR functions were outsourced to an overseas company specializing in outsourcing other resources.
Maybe I should set up an overseas HR shop.
'Our goal is to reduce our entire data center presence by 2015,'
I'd say they are way ahead of schedule. They have already closed down numerous datacenters. With the upcoming recession and the hard hit financial sectors, I would imagine they might be able to close everything down by 2010.
Maybe he hopes to reach a singularity point and have a Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect "Failure".
http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
better able to afford to reduce that risk itself
Q: Tell me, in the six years since 9-11, and the twelve years since Oklahoma City, just what exactly has been done to prevent ol' Timothy Abdul Hussein McVeigh from driving an ammonia-fertilizer truck bomb to One "Bilshire Woulevard" and taking out the entire telecomm infrastructure for the southwestern United States?
A: Not a damned thing.
the concentration of value making a centralized location more of a target
Exactly - CONCENTRATION MAKES FOR A HIGHER VALUE TARGET.
In general, subway bombings, like 3-11 in Spain, and 7-07 in England, can't work in the USA, because our transportation system is de-centralized: We don't ride mass transit subways, but rather drive individual cars and trucks, and the bad guys can't build enough bombs [or find enough suicide bombers] to take out each one of us individually.
Which is to say: From a strategic point of view, decentralization is a not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
Only a bean counter [in the pursuit of squeezing the last possible dollar out of the Accounts Payable side of the ledger] could possibly overlook the massive strategic advantage of decentralization.
By the way, when you're concentrated like that [you could call it a "monoculture of concentration"], it makes the facility not only more attractive to Jehadis wanting to take it down, but also to Jehadis [either geopolitically motivated, or merely of the corporate espionage variety] wanting to infiltrate the facility and become a mole there.
The more information you aggregate in one place, the more valuable it becomes to work your moles into that place, and the more effort will be expended trying to get the moles in the door.
Then you're an idiot for not setting up a backup at an independent facility.
If you're serious about commoditizing these IT services, then it's the responsibility of the commoditizer to commoditize the redundancy, with massively redundant facilities [each in a bomb-shelter-quality building, way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Blackwater guys with 50 caliber machine guns], massively redundant uplinks from the client [high speed cable TV lines, high speed telecomm lines, high speed satellite connections], massively redundant downlinks to the client, and massively-redundant internal interconnects between the redundant facilities.
PS: But I will add a point which I made further down in this thread: Almost by definition, anything which can be commoditized [like basic email services] almost surely cannot be adding any value to your business, because if it is commoditized, then any of your [possible potential] competitors could be purchasing the commodity just as readily as you purchase that commodity.
Rather, it is necessarily the SPECIALIZED SYSTEMS which give you an advantage over your competition, and, by definition, the specialized systems cannot be commoditized.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That, or work for the US Government, and get a high-level clearance. Then your job security is a function of national security, and something not meant to die off.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.