Sun Plans to Have No In-House Data Centers by 2015 158
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."
Still in business by 2015? (Score:2, Insightful)
2015? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still in business by 2015? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun New Delhi will be going strong, I'm sure.
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Eat your own dog food. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Eat your own dog food. (Score:3, Insightful)
More snarky Sun spin (Score:4, Insightful)
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" ??
Re:Eat your own dog food. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
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 services and servers we support are simply being moved to the datacenter?
Re:Eat your own dog food. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
I mean, I can see this with some other examples. But if you're a router vendor, there's no reason you shouldn't have a finely-tuned hummin'n'thrummin internal network: your product is all about that, the talent you need to hire to in order to produce those routers is going to have to know how, and it's a good opportunity to real-world test your products.
But then again, Oracle probably does have some employees using Excel as a database.
Re:Sun does... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Eat your own dog food. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fat chance. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Eat your own dog food. (Score:4, Insightful)