Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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)
I'm not sure if you're trying to be sarcastic, but on Wall St., there is a trend to move all desktops (including trader desktops) onto thin clients with the backend in data centers. So really, this isn't far-fetched.
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.
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"
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."
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.
In that way, they actually _are_ eating their own dog food. If they can use virtualization etc. etc. in their own company using their own hardware/software at some external datacenter, then they are an excellent showcase for their clients.
I think the confusion is caused by a bad formulation of the plan, the fact that I am actually trying to explain it here shows enough! I have the impression that Sun has the right ideas and the right technology, but terribly fails in bringing a convincing way that they have a economically viable strategy. They open sourced almost all their software assets recently, they started to OEM Solaris to Dell (how will that sell Sun hardware?), and it goes on. Many comments on JS's blog are from confused small investors that wonder how they will ever get to see any money coming back from their stocks. I understand Sun's problem, hardware has a either a low profit marge (Dell) or you need convincing ways to sell the expensive hardware Sun or IBM sells. Sun is trying in many many ways to find a revolutionary way to do this, but they seem to forget that in the end all you need is a talented, convincing salesman to get the hardware to the costumer.
Bottom line: your tech is ok, but get a PR and sales department that works, Sun!
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling