Sun's CEO On FOSS and the Cloud

ruphus13 writes "Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz continues to promote the use of Open Source, and says the downturn in the economy will only boost the momentum behind FOSS. From his post, 'Free and open source software is sweeping across the vast majority of the Fortune 500. When you see the world's most conservative companies starting to deploy open source, you know momentum is on your side. That's creating massive opportunity for those of us who have pioneered the market, to drive commercial opportunities... We announced just last week that we're building the Sun Cloud, atop open source platforms — from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish. By building on open source, we're able to avoid proprietary storage and networking products, alongside proprietary software.'" In related news, the Sun-IBM deal proposed last week has been called "anti-competitive" by a tech industry group, while others are speculating on how it could affect Linux and Java.

Comments

Still the Cloud?

[Idiot with a gun]

All this cloud nonsense is silly. Most end-users and businesses have invested way too much money in powerful workstations, desktops, and laptops, to justify scrapping them in favor of ultralights depending on cloud computing. It's just a marketing pipe dream.

Even a watered down version of the cloud, say for storage has inherent security issues. How do you control what data goes where, who accesses it, how do you secure it, etc. If I'm counting on some server to hold all of my data outside of my computer, then god save me if I lose my network connection, or if their servers are compromised. At least if I lose my own data, I know whom to blame.

Re:Still the Cloud?

[noundi]

First of all it's not something you migrate to in a heartbeat. It takes time and careful consideration. And you're right, not all benefit from it but why should they? Or more importantly, why is it bad unless the majority benefits from it? There are many businesses that would find this to be a good solution. And what goes for central storage, most larger networks often use a similair solution. I have my data on my hard drive, but trust me, if I lose my network connection my data is rendered more or less useless anyway. But the point is you don't build a cloud system and leave space for network outage. If you're very depended on it you make sure there are plan B's and C's and D's.

Re:Still the Cloud?

[Jawn98685]

Yes, still the cloud.
My guess is that you don't have much experience in supporting large numbers of "...powerful workstations, desktops, and laptops..." If you did, you wouldn't make such stupid presumptions like thinking that the amount of money "invested" in that hardware is the significant cost associated with operating that hardware and the systems that depend on it.

There are many potential reasons why cloud computing may not be a good fit, but the "waste" of jettisoning legacy hardware is hardly one of them.

Re:Still the Cloud?

[rackserverdeals]

All this cloud nonsense is silly. Most end-users and businesses have invested way too much money in powerful workstations, desktops, and laptops, to justify scrapping them in favor of ultralights depending on cloud computing. It's just a marketing pipe dream.

The version of the cloud they are releasing is similar to the Amazon EC2 platform. It is not currently aimed at "workstatinos, desktops and laptops" as you said. The primary focus seems to be for startups and other companies that need an easy way to grow their infrastructure without having to make a big investment in hardware.

One example is a merchant that does 90% of their business around Christmas. Instead of having a rack full of expensive computers in a colo facility sitting 90% idle most of the year, they can expand their capacity just when they need it and save a lot of money.

Sun put up some videos from a recent conference where they annouced the Sun Cloud.

It's very cool. Think about all the times you've developed your dream infrastructure and maybe drew it out in Visio or Dia, except when you're adding shapes into your network diagram, actual virtual servers are being deployed.

At least that's what the demonstration shows.

Now lets say you're having a problem with your appllcation and you don't know where it is but you have to do some stress testing to figure it out. You can't do that to your live system.

You can essentially copy and paste your whole production configuration as a test environment, run your tests, profiling, fix your application, then delete the whole setup and never have to pay for it again. You can't do that with real hardware.

You could do the same with a development environment. And it seems you only pay while it's running, so you launch it from 9-5 (ok 11:30ish to 4:19pm) and turn it off the rest of the time to save money. Should be much cheaper than buying twice as many real servers.

Re:Still the Cloud?

[Tranzistors]

Even a watered down version of the cloud, say for storage has inherent security issues. How do you control what data goes where, who accesses it, how do you secure it, etc.
If I got it correctly, SUN will provide cloud under roof â" cloud is owned and controlled by the company using it.
From http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/unified_computing

Third, unlike our peers, we also announced our cloud will be available for deployment behind corporate firewalls - that we'll commercialize our public cloud by instantiating it in private datacenters for those customers who can't, due to regulation, security or business constraints, use a public cloud. We recognize that workloads subject to fiduciary duty or regulatory scrutiny won't move to public clouds - if you can't move to the cloud, we'll move the cloud to you.

Re:Still the Cloud?

[pilgrim23]

One interesting example of "the cloud" would be the way IBM and other hardware engineers (CEs to the older among us) report basic hardware issues on trouble tickets from customer sites. I say IBM because the ubiquitous "IBM Brick" was the communication device every CE carried in the 70s and 80s. Now everyone from Ikon Office to NCR has a version of it on a Cell network. The Engineer updates the ticket, orders parts, pages people, gets customer authorization and even supply billing , heck he can even chat from his hand-held. The cloud is old and has been with us for longer then you realize.

Re:Still the Cloud?

[nine-times]

Preventing vendor lock in. Ensuring privacy of sensitive data. Neither of these is possible with any cloud computing product available.

I'm decidedly not saying that any "cloud" service currently available is perfect. I'm saying many of the problems are not inherent, but rather could be solved. For example, having fast and reliable ubiquitous Internet access isn't something that Amazon or Google could simply fix. It's an infrastructure problem, and that infrastructure can be improved greatly from its current state.

Re:Still the Cloud?

[rackserverdeals]

In large companies, you don't run equipment without a service contract.

Typical service contracts run for 3 years. You can continue to pay for support, but at some point you're paying more than it would cost to buy new.

This company is best positioned for the future

[Xemu]

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz continues to promote ... says the downturn in the economy will only boost the momentum ...That's creating massive opportunity for those of us who have pioneered the market, to drive commercial opportunities... We announced just last week that ...

So in other words, A high-level spokesperson for [vendor X] is quoted as saying that [recent event] is really good for [vendor X] business, and that recently released [product Y] is positioned perfectly for current market conditions.

What a surprise.

Re:This company is best positioned for the future

[pr0nbot]

The motives for a statement have no relevance to its truth or untruth.

I agree about the downturn helping (;-))

[davecb]

As an Evil Contractor[TM], I usually find a downturn increase both

• my business, and
• my customers' interest in low-cost, medium-performance or medium-feature-set solutions.

--dave

Re:The Schwartz is with you ... NOT

[javacowboy]

Here are the instructions for installing 1.1 on Linux (haven't tried this myself):

http://java.dzone.com/tips/javafx-11-linux-netbeans

And OpenSolaris (not sure if they work with 1.1, I haven't had time to try):

http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/javafx

The reason JavaFX is not officially available on Linux and OpenSolaris is because they haven't solved the media rendering issues on those two OS's, so they can't offer the full non-beta versions.

Besides, if JavaFX doesn't work completely on Sun's *own* OS, then you know that there are substantial issues still to be resolved. It has nothing to do with any vindication against open source.

Seed the cloud

[MrEricSir]

Forecast is cloudy with a chance of data loss.

Sun's vague strategy made less vague

[John Bayko]

It's very difficult to get a concrete handle on Jonathan Schwartz' description of Sun's strategy, but not impossible. I don't know why Jonathan prefers generalities rather than actual examples, but it may be either not wanting to give away strategic secrets to competitors, or because it's just such a large company that there's no single example that he thinks stands out.

But there is a strategy. To take MySQL as an example, why spend a billion dollars on a free database?

First, it's both promotion, and a point of contact to get in touch with people who are doing something database-y - and might also want ZFS and Solaris. And maybe it's a pilot project for something that's going to need a lot of servers later - free software has to run on something. It's a combination of marketing and customer relations.

There are two kinds of customers, Jonathan points out - those which need expensive support contracts because their downtime would cost even more, and those who don't. Previously those who don't would by cheaper software, but by making all the important software free, there's no profit in competing at the low end anymore. This is exactly the niche that Microsoft Windows (and other Microsoft products) grew into, eventually displacing more and more Unix (including Sun) and mini/mainframe (DEC, IBM) systems. Free software forms a kind of firebreak around the profit services, preventing small competitors from doing the same thing again. Jonathan Schwartz doesn't actually say anything like this, but it is a side effect of free software, and Red Hat does the same thing. In this sense, buying MySQL and giving away the software preserves Sun profits (small companies can still compete, but by using the same software - MySQL, Linux, Solaris, Apache - they are now interchangeable with Sun, so there's no "Windows lock-in" effect).

Of course, if the software runs best on Sun hardware, all the better. For example, the UltraSPARK T1/T2 systems which run multithreaded workloads so well. Being able to, say, make MySQL more threaded would give them an advantage.

The "cloud computing" thing hasn't been really well defined, but is basically a potential development platform, like web applications. Like many, Sun has been trying for a long time to get the technology right, including a number of Java technologies (remember Jini and JXTA?). The ultimate goal with that is to basically break down the barrier between those "expensive contract customers" and "free software" customers by making "computing services" so flexible and easy that it's no longer a question of either a million dollar contract, or do it yourself - you can define where and how you want to access your computing resources, and exactly how much control you want over them, and just pay for what you want or need. And what you don't want to pay for, you do yourself. Obviously big customers can't be milked forever (the current recession is a big threat).

If there's one characteristic that Sun has displayed, it's trying to be ahead of the curve in the technology market. That means a lot of mistakes, and trying a lot of things in immature, unprofitable markets, with the hopes that when they hit the right thing, they'll make it big by being first. They don't want to be "Microsofted" like IBM was.

The downside is it looks like Sun is doing a lot of insane things, giving up profits in mature areas for "happy thoughts". I won't say whether these strategies are the best or most effective, or premature or just dumb. But of all the original Unix workstation makers, Sun alone is still around and independent. There must be a reason for that.