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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").
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..
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.
Imagine no Beowulf cluster of these.
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!