Ok, I haven’t exactly kept up with blogging during the conference. I just figured out how to connect with my laptop from the conference hall. I am currently sitting in the keynote address from Sun. I miss Scott McNealy as a speaker. Johnathan Schwarts is interesting but not as good as Scott. It is interesting to note that he has updated his wardrobe and is starting to look like a CEO.
“Our [Sun’s] business model is to drive change and innovation into the data center”. Interesting concept. How do you run a $26B company with this concept? Not sure about that but I guess it is how you run a $13B corporation.
“A massive global buildout is underway”. Every business is growing. On average 4% growth in GDP for countries is expected. Some grow more, some grow less. Faster, better computers are not necessarily a good thing. It takes less computer and less capital to run the same investment. It talkes about $8M for the hardware to run infrastructure for a $13B company. Some companies are growing faster than Moore’s Law because they are responding to consumers that demand interaction. Some examples are EBay, Major League Baseball, ExxonMobil. These companies need very large data centers that require significantly more horsepower. This is where Sun is targeting because the traditional customer will eventually turn to service suppliers to get servers in their offices.
Sun is focusing on four verticals. Software, servers, storage, and services.
glassfish.dev.java.net – need to look at this…..GlassFish is the name for the open source development
project
for
building a Java EE 5 application server. It is based on the source code
for Sun Java System Application Server PE 9 donated by Sun Microsystems
and TopLink persistence code donated by Oracle. The question is how does it correlate to Tomcat or the Oracle Apps server
“Solaris crossed the 6M install base. 70% of these are on x64/x86”. This begs the question of why Sparc and why Sun continues to develop these chips. The Linux variant on ubuntu now runs on Sparc so this might add some lifetime to the chipset.
“There are times when our hardware will be the most innovative, there are times that our software will be the most innovative”. This is an interesting concept. It is also a great statement because the hardware group typically lags in delivery of product while someone else leapfrogs the technology. Using this strategy is interesting.
The $1k rebate from PG&E is an interesting sales concept. This successfully focuses the fact that other vendors consume too much power. If a customer has a competitors server running in California, PG&E will give the customer $1k rebate if they replace this with a Sun server. Interesting idea. I wonder how they structured this deal and how we could potentially replicate it with Entergy or Reliant.
The new concept…. 40 foot shipping container full of Sun equipment. Project blackbox. 250 systems/container. 2 Petabytes of tape. Up and running in five minutes. Interesting packaging. To connect it requires three phase power, network connection, and hot and cold water connections. The racks are water cooled with chillers between the sideways mounted racks and has a center walkway for servicing. This is interesting and my guess is that everyone else will start delivering this as a solution within a few years.
more later….