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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").
Another initiative from Sun: We would soon all have Net PCs.
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!
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!
Imagine no Beowulf cluster of these.
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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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.
The Sun provides heat and light for the Earth. If the Sun cuts back by 50%, the Earth becomes cooler and darker. Of course, that will be great news for the polar bears. :P
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.
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.