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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."
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?
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..
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!
My interpretation of the vague article was that they are attempting to host everything where once upon a time you could have a Sun server onsite. I think the writing is on the wall that system administrators are going to go the way of the tv repairman. It makes little sense in the modern world to have a server onsite spending most of its life idle. I know many a sysadmin are going to come running crying about how networks aren't reliable enough, data security, yadda yadda yadda, but you know what? I look at my organization now and two years ago, and about half of the software in use is hosted, while two years ago almost none was. Most of our partners and vendors are just converting their applications to websites. The users are happier in general. The uptimes are much greater. In the end it's cheaper for our organization. If I were a system administrator I'd start retraining because there is going to be a slow and steady reduction of demand. There will always be sysadmins, but with consolidation there will be much less demand. I know this will probably get modded troll, but I think many people need to face reality. The world changes. Attitudes change. It's better to face it head on and be prepared than deny it and be jobless with no skills.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Man, if *Sun* can't afford to maintain a Solaris data center, then who can?
It isn't that Sun can't afford to. It's that it doesn't make sense. They are in the business of inventing stuff, not in the business of laying down cables, plugging in blades and pouring gas into backup generators. That's a very different set of competencies.
If you bothered to RTFBP at all, you'd see that they're taking advantage of Solaris features to meet the stated 2013 goal of 50% reduction in data center physical space used, power, and heat output. Who wouldn't want to save money and resources on such things?
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" ??
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The machines to administer aren't going away. The operating systems on these administered machines aren't going away. The users using these machines aren't going away. All of the things that sysadmins support are still going to be there if the servers move from our in-house server room down to the colo. The sysadmin's role is still the same, just the machines are now remote.
I guess I may be biased here as a sysadmin, but how do you propose a sysadmin's demand is going to diminish when all of the services and servers we support are simply being moved to the datacenter?
Similarly, not every router vendor is going to have a super-bad-ass internal network.
:)
Why?
I mean, I can see this with some other examples. But if you're a router vendor, there's no reason you shouldn't have a finely-tuned hummin'n'thrummin internal network: your product is all about that, the talent you need to hire to in order to produce those routers is going to have to know how, and it's a good opportunity to real-world test your products.
But then again, Oracle probably does have some employees using Excel as a database.
Tweet, tweet.
Your IT department and data center employees aren't writing your software and engineering your hardware, in the first place. When they encounter problems or desire certain features, they have to work with the developer and engineering groups like anyone else would. If someone else is managing these services for you and still using your products, they will still be reporting any encountered problems or feature requests to the exact same developer and engineering groups. And in both cases, any problems or downtime still affects you all the same.
Say I'm a company that has 100 customers and each customer has a server onsite that runs our software. That's 100 servers that probably rarely exceed 5-10% usage. Those 100 customers could be consolidated to 5 large hosted servers that have a moderate predictable load. 5 servers don't require nearly the staff as 100. Sysadmins won't just go away, but the demand will be much less and it will be much more competitive.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
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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
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