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Sun Plans to Have No In-House Data Centers by 2015

Posted by Soulskill on Thu Jan 10, 2008 11:05 PM
from the time-to-give-your-seven-year-notice dept.
Sun Microsystems The Internet IT
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."
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[+] Is the IT Department Dead? 417 comments
alphadogg writes "The IT department is dead, and it is a shift to utility computing that will kill this corporate career path. So predicts Nicholas Carr in his new book launched Monday, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google." Carr is best known for a provocative Harvard Business Review article entitled "Does IT Matter?" Published in 2003, the article asserted that IT investments didn't provide companies with strategic advantages because when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same."
Submission: Sun's Goal: No In-House Data Centers by 2015 by 1sockchuck (826398)
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  • Eat your own dog food. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Valdrax (32670) on Thursday January 10 2008, @11:08PM (#21995022)
    Man, if *Sun* can't afford to maintain a Solaris data center, then who can?

    • Re:Eat your own dog food. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smallpaul (65919) <paul@pres c o d . n et> on Thursday January 10 2008, @11:52PM (#21995356)
      Re: "Eat your own dog food" Do you understand what the word "utility" means? It means like electricty. Or Networking. The guys who make dams do not also run power companies to "eat their own dog food." They build the stuff and sell it to people who are experts at managing it (which is a very different situation). Similarly, not every router vendor is going to have a super-bad-ass internal network. When appropriate, they probably use VPN over the public Internet just like anybody else. They sell their routers to the guys who run the Internet. Tractor companies do not need to run farms to "eat their own dogfood."

      Man, if *Sun* can't afford to maintain a Solaris data center, then who can?

      It isn't that Sun can't afford to. It's that it doesn't make sense. They are in the business of inventing stuff, not in the business of laying down cables, plugging in blades and pouring gas into backup generators. That's a very different set of competencies.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by E-Lad (1262)
      If you bothered to RTFBP at all, you'd see that they're taking advantage of Solaris features to meet the stated 2013 goal of 50% reduction in data center physical space used, power, and heat output. Who wouldn't want to save money and resources on such things?

      • Re:Eat your own dog food. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by pimpimpim (811140) on Friday January 11 2008, @08:10AM (#21997730)
        I didn't read it, but everybody knows that Sun is pressing ideas like this (netpc etc.) for years, so it makes real sense. I read Jonathan Schwartz's blogs every now and then, at one point he mentioned a NYC company that had trouble growing because there was no place left on the roof for air conditioning outlets. It is Sun's focus to change that with their software/hardware: just put a datacenter somewhere xx miles away in the fields, and you won't have cooling problems at your offices.

        In that way, they actually _are_ eating their own dog food. If they can use virtualization etc. etc. in their own company using their own hardware/software at some external datacenter, then they are an excellent showcase for their clients.

        I think the confusion is caused by a bad formulation of the plan, the fact that I am actually trying to explain it here shows enough! I have the impression that Sun has the right ideas and the right technology, but terribly fails in bringing a convincing way that they have a economically viable strategy. They open sourced almost all their software assets recently, they started to OEM Solaris to Dell (how will that sell Sun hardware?), and it goes on. Many comments on JS's blog are from confused small investors that wonder how they will ever get to see any money coming back from their stocks. I understand Sun's problem, hardware has a either a low profit marge (Dell) or you need convincing ways to sell the expensive hardware Sun or IBM sells. Sun is trying in many many ways to find a revolutionary way to do this, but they seem to forget that in the end all you need is a talented, convincing salesman to get the hardware to the costumer.

        Bottom line: your tech is ok, but get a PR and sales department that works, Sun!

    • Re:Eat your own dog food. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2008, @12:18AM (#21995526)
      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.
  • Another initiative from Sun: We would soon all have Net PCs [wikipedia.org].

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm not sure if you're trying to be sarcastic, but on Wall St., there is a trend to move all desktops (including trader desktops) onto thin clients with the backend in data centers. So really, this isn't far-fetched.

  • Still in business by 2015? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stoolpigeon (454276) * <bittercode@gmail> on Thursday January 10 2008, @11:22PM (#21995160) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by porkThreeWays (895269) on Thursday January 10 2008, @11:50PM (#21995340)
      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.
      • I suppose that is good news for us system administrators that run hosted services for other companies...huh?

        There are actually many large companies that do not run data centers; however, seeing the cost they are willing pay for a completely hosted IT department, I do not think they are saving money or resources.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by rnswebx (473058)
        The machines to administer aren't going away. The operating systems on these administered machines aren't going away. The users using these machines aren't going away. All of the things that sysadmins support are still going to be there if the servers move from our in-house server room down to the colo. The sysadmin's role is still the same, just the machines are now remote.

        I guess I may be biased here as a sysadmin, but how do you propose a sysadmin's demand is going to diminish when all of the service

        • Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)

          by porkThreeWays (895269) on Friday January 11 2008, @12:41AM (#21995668)
          Say I'm a company that has 100 customers and each customer has a server onsite that runs our software. That's 100 servers that probably rarely exceed 5-10% usage. Those 100 customers could be consolidated to 5 large hosted servers that have a moderate predictable load. 5 servers don't require nearly the staff as 100. Sysadmins won't just go away, but the demand will be much less and it will be much more competitive.
      • Maybe that's why I don't get it. The environment I'm working in isn't large enough to have a lot of stuff just sitting around. I wish we did, but most of our stuff is going all the time. It'd be nice to have more redundancy but we just can't afford it.

        We are using virtualization on some things - but mostly little stuff. I work with our primary production databases and we don't share those boxes. We are getting all we can out of them on our own. But I'm a dba - so in my opinion I never have eno
      • 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 compa
    • They're going to have it all hosted on The Google.
      • and google keeps building giant data centers. i know you are joking - but this seems like just shuffling the deck.
  • This is nothing new. Political parties have stored their data in out-houses for ages.

    - RG>

  • 2015? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jdigriz (676802) on Thursday January 10 2008, @11:37PM (#21995264)
    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..
  • Sun's plan reflects the shift to utility computing discussed in Nicholas Carr's new book

    Yes, well ... good luck with that.
  • U will be assimilated into the one true, gigagargantagoogle corporate data empire.

  • Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by flyingfsck (986395) on Thursday January 10 2008, @11:49PM (#21995334)
    So, they are going to spin off their data centres into a separate company - that's all.
    • Yes, and this company will, for some reason, still be within the confines of Sun's buildings. In fact this new company's CEO will have his/her office right next to McNealy's. Walking through this building will cause you to enter the new company and then Sun every few steps...
  • We'd be more than happy to take their DC over on our boxes on our site. They're SUN boxes anyhow, if they like. We'll virtualize it and cut it up whichever way they like. We do this all the time.

  • No machines (Score:5, Funny)

    by SEWilco (27983) on Thursday January 10 2008, @11:58PM (#21995388) Homepage Journal
    Imagine no Beowulf cluster of these.
    • Can't imagine no beowulf clusters, because by definition, one has to think of a beowulf cluster in order to know what not to think about. Clear as mud, hey?
  • After years of nonsensically muttering "the network is the computer", the marketdroids finally convinced IT that they don't need a datacenter.

  • More snarky Sun spin (Score:4, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar (4328) on Friday January 11 2008, @12:08AM (#21995466) Homepage Journal
    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 [xand.com] 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" ??
  • I predict we'll all have Internet in our pockets (yes the WHOLE Internet) by 2055, and I don't mean _access to_ the internet, I mean an entire mirror copy, that I can update daily via my WiFi 802.954z connection that has the range of our entire galaxy and works at speeds of SONet 768000/sec. ... and yes it will run Linux! :P

  • Fat chance. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sporkme (983186) * on Friday January 11 2008, @12:51AM (#21995728) Homepage

    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 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 [slashdot.org] 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

  • secret SaaS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hxnwix (652290) on Friday January 11 2008, @12:52AM (#21995732) Journal
    Remember when third parties were going to buy computing time from Sun? [sun.com]

    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.

  • What is replacing the in-house data centers (Score:3, Funny)

    by Stuntmonkey (557875) on Friday January 11 2008, @01:19AM (#21995854)
    ...is "out-house" data centers. Powered entirely by human waste. Very green, very modern, it's recycling for the new millennium.

  • Where is the best place for a datacenter? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kupfernigk (1190345) on Friday January 11 2008, @04:57AM (#21996820)
    It obviously makes sense to keep datacenters convenient for cooling. The idea of using container ships is good, because it gives you loads of sea water. The shipping container datacenter's main problem is getting rid of the heat, because air to air heat exchangers are so inefficient in terms of space.

    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.

    • They're authors of java and open office.

    • they SELL servers and write OSes... and think they should pay somebody else to run it!

      That's kind of crappy. If you don't "eat your dog food" as a HARDWARE and OS company, who can take you seriously? If you aren't running your own stuff, you're loosing the BEST opportunity to improve your product!!! If you run your product in production, then you can make your CUSTOMER experience better... something all these people forget. Nothing beats dealing with a company that can take a day and REPEAT your problem

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Seumas (6865)
        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 dow
      • According to Slashdot GroupThink, there whole enterprise software business could not exist. Because no startup could ever possibly make software for big companies: how would they possibly "dogfood test it". Even Sun itself could not exist because Sun started as a little company that sold to big companies.

    • Re:Sun does... (Score:5, Funny)

      by creimer (824291) on Friday January 11 2008, @12:31AM (#21995604) Homepage
      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
    • It also implies they'll be completely out of the software business by then. It only makes sense if they're planning to totally reinvent themselves along the way. Personally, if I were at Sun and thought SaaS was going to be the model of the future, I'd be making moves to ensure that other companies would be getting their services from me, not dismantling anything I owned that could possibly be used to offer such a service.

      Still, the whole model is predicated on networking technology becoming so efficient th

      • It also implies they'll be completely out of the software business by then.

        Why? What is the relationship between outsourcing their own application hosting and being out of the business of selling software. There is no correspondence.

        It only makes sense if they're planning to totally reinvent themselves along the way. Personally, if I were at Sun and thought SaaS was going to be the model of the future, I'd be making moves to ensure that other companies would be getting their services from me, not dis

    • The computers will be in someone's house, just not Sun's. This just means that Sun will be completely out of the hardware business by then.

      Why? What does one have to do with the other? Of course the computers will be "somewhere." That's what "no in-house" XXX means. "No in-house catering" does not imply the non-existence of food elsewhere!

    • hrm..not seeing how you made the jump to sun being out of the hardware business.

      There will still be a need for big honkin' servers in data centers...but data centers are very expensive to run. may as well farm it out to someone who specializes in it, and just buy service/disk space from that company.

      (I'd imagine that they would have a certain basis for buying that service from a company that runs on all Sun gear.)

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