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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."
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.
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Sun already outsources their help desk (and has for a few years) and that has caused lengthy delays in productivity. I have seen new hires who didn't have access to necessary services for many weeks because the help desk person didn't understand English well enough to comprehend what was being asked of them, even though they gave the impression that they understood.
Sun has also been outsourcing many of their services for years, such as email. That is handled by an external company that uses Sun's servers and hardware to run and manage their services for them.
Sun also outsources a massive amount of technical support, engineering and developer resources from HCL in India.
For many years Sun has been pushing a "sun on sun" philosophy where everything at Sun that could possibly run Sun products should do so. There isn't much left to run since everything is being outsourced. Take a guess as to how long before Sun is just one building with a bunch of executives overseeing everything from middle management downward overseas and in outsourced domestic services.
No. It's virtual servers all the way down.
... Elecance is left to the implementors.
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