Sun reveals war on data centers Sun Microsystems plans to give up on data centers by 2015. How do you like that? "Sun IT is driving towards a consolidated and unified data center approach by 2015, while reducing overall operating costs, overall energy consumptions, and to eliminate all SunIT data center's [sic]," writes Sun data center architect Brian Cinque …
It might just be that they don't expect the company to last that long, with an initial decline followed by complete failure by 2015. Which would be one way of reducing their operating requirements down to zero...
Alternatively someone has been exposed to too many buzzwords and hype and finally cracked. It would certainly explain some of the claims!
As Steve Ballmer has been saying for years, Sun is a stupid company! To think we were once partners with them, yet since the depature of McNealy sun has gone from the odd nut case remark and action to full out mental asylum case. I suppose moving to such a HQ was forward thinking for the outfit!
Why is anyone in IT going to give up the data centre? Why is Sun better suited to running a large data centre than an IT team that actually knows its own systems?
And how can having a data centre geograpically located elsewhere be cheaper? Unless of course we're talking about current Chineese pay rates lol
I just wish Sun would do what it does best and innovate, not spout crap about some wacky idea becuase IBM is kickings its ass
Sun generates a lot of cash. As detailed by Ponytail at an analyst meeting, they will be maintaining current cash levels and purchasing stock with the rest, to the tune of $500m a quarter. The reverse split, the buy back, and the tender offer to small shareholders is all about drawing down the float and giving KKR a taste of Jonathan before jumping in with both feet. KKR and management will own this company within 24 months. Sun can then follow out the remaining 36+ months of their 5 year plan without the scrutiny of Wall Street. The arrival of Victoria Falls this year will also be a shot in the arm.
"It's an evolving, moving manor that Sun (presumably the whole of it) will move in. So it's a sort of shape-shifting Death Star meets next generation Winnebago, right?"
A Spooky SurReal Structured IntelAIgents Vehicle, John? AI Stealth Sun rather than Death Star.
Now that would put them Light Years ahead, meThinks...... [with an Enigmatic Legacy?**]
*A reference to a post, posted to here, but which isn't here, Spirited away by Alien Headhunters if we're lucky and they're more intelligent than we imagine. Win Win always Wins Beta.
** Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network
"Cinque, however, never describes what type of utility service will replace Sun's own systems. Is he talking about Sun plugging into a system run by PG&E, the local utility company, or is he talking about Sun managing and sharing its own utility-type service?"
It will be funny if they move to PG&E since I saw the press release last year that they are moving all their Sun servers to AIX on Power.
The Green movement will be the death of Sun. While Sun had initial benefits from their Green message, customers have become smarter and are not looking for low utilization systems which pretend to be green because of a "threads/watt" marketing gimic.
http://www.geocities.com/sunsrockchip/
We keep hearing from everybody about the death of Sun, yet Sun's market share has grown over the last few years as has their profitability. If PG&E has switched to AIX it's no wonder they're ihaving so much trouble in their IT department. I don't care about threads per watt, but I do care about threads/chip. Comparing my workload on a T5120, ALL HP products and IBM Power, the T5120 blew the doors off everything else at less than half the cost.
... or, in fact, anything other than than Sun's marketing web presence[*], you will have realised that Sun have an awful lot to learn about providing a reliable computing service. Perhaps they have just realised this and are planning to outsource the whole thing to someone who will run the whole show on a couple of BBC micros. It can't be worse than what they manage at present.
[*] And if you've looked at the marketing sites in any depth, then you will also have realised that they have an equal amount to learn about marketing. I hear they are planning to move from a monthly to weekly rename-all-products cycle. Tragically under the new regime their technical people seem to have fallen under the sway of the marketing people too.
I can kinda see where the guy's coming from - Data centres are expensive to build and maintain, especially for companies that don't have a focus on IT as their core business. Having said that, for a company that specalises in large computing clusters, mainframes and high end computing and the like, they're kinda giving the impression that "what we sell ain't much cop". Whoopsie.
I'm just wondering if we'll ever get to a point where distributed computing hooks up servers and applications virtually to negate the need for servers, having an entirely virtual data centre within the desktop farm.
I believe that I know how Sun are going to achieve the elimination of all data centres. It is a simple two step process.
1. Migrate operations from all Data Centres to new Utility Computing Centres.
2. Close all the no longer needed Data Centres.
Simple,
ps.
This business plan is confidential and proprietery. In order to use this business plan you must pay me ridiculous contracting fees.
...from the Sun internal IT perspective.
1. Sun's internal IT group does not have enough money upgrade their ancient infrastructure.
2. They can get money to do what they need if they disguise the effort as supporting the utility computing corporate initiative.
3. Thus, internal IT can get on a modern infrastructure by moving their apps to the 'utility computing data center' - which looks a whole lot like a regular old data center - with newer gear.
4. They can then talk about how they use "0 data centers", even though that just means that they have outsourced their data centers to a different group within Sun.
As to how relevant this is to the rest of us... Well I'll leave that for the jury to decide. ;)
In 2012, Sun releases enormous update to Java, containing a distributed computing client a la Seti@home.
As more and more PCs get "upgraded", Sun migrates functionality from their data centers to what effectively becomes their botnet.
By 2015, there's more aggregated computing power in the Java client cloud than in their data centers and the migration is complete.
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