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| Don Grantham |
I was excited to attend our Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) in Las Vegas in October, as it's our largest annual gathering of our worldwide engineering community — thousands of customer-facing engineers from all corners of the globe.
The theme of the conference was innovation and growth, sparking discussions on the evolution of the market, disruptive technologies reshaping costs, and how they fuel growth for Sun, our partners, and our customers.
A recurring topic was the explosive growth in computing needs and the increasing demand for network infrastructures to meet those needs — what Sun refers to as Redshift. There was also buzz on the growing needs of our customers for energy efficiency and eco responsibility — or what's often called "green IT."
These are two key technology areas where disruptions are occurring with our customers, creating a significant economic impact on your business.
Redshift: Meeting the Demand for Massive Computing Power
In conversations with you, our customers, I'm hearing what keeps you up at night. On one hand, your servers are running at low capacity. On the other, your datacenters are running out of space and power. Infrastructure is poorly utilized, yet datacenters are bursting at the seams. How can this be?
The Web has catalyzed an explosion of participation-based innovation. Whether it's Web 2.0 — or as Sun calls it, the Participation Age — the core idea is the network effect: systems improve the more people use them. The result is an increased demand for network infrastructure being driven by society, governments, enterprises, and communities as millions of people join the world network each week.
Sun's Redshift theory of computing, as defined by Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos describes these rapidly growing applications. I highly recommend reading this InformationWeek report for a good perspective on Sun's Redshift theory.
In short, Redshift is about understanding where you can cut costs and how you can deal with runaway growth. In fact, you may be using a Redshift infrastructure already through high-performance computing grids or software as a service (SaaS) vendors.
What does this mean for your technology infrastructure? New content, new consumers, new devices, and new services equal new demands on the network. This drives increased demand on and complexity for your infrastructure: mobility, reliability, network management, power reduction, virtualization, security, Web services, etc. The list goes on! Get these right, and you have the competitive advantage.
Green IT: Reducing Datacenter Energy and Space Consumption
Many of you are surprised when I tell you 40 percent of the cost of running a datacenter is energy consumption. Energy costs are increasingly impacting the bottom line. Practical impacts of energy are hitting customers who are running out of space, power, and cooling in datacenters. Soon, if not already for businesses in major cities, it will cost more to cool and supply power to a server than to buy the capital equipment.
Don't just take our word for it. Analyst firm Gartner is also covering this trend and the often simple steps companies can take toward more efficient and eco responsible computing.
Leading companies are beginning to measure their global impact and environmental footprint, and to put in place programs to lessen that impact. Using an example close to home, Sun recently published its 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report, demonstrating our commitment to transparency and our philosophy of "Innovate, Act, Share" — while underscoring Sun's commitment to CSR and eco responsibility.
Sun's CSR strategy is an integral part of our business objectives to drive positive social, economic, and ecological change. We expect the number of companies that do this to continue to grow yearly as stakeholders use this as a factor for investments and purchases — and as attention to environmental issues continues to grow. Increasingly our customers are looking at their global impact and environmental footprint, and more of them are taking action to improve eco responsibility.
eBay is an excellent example of a company responding to both of these trends. eBay is a Sun customer and participated in a customer panel at the recent Customer Engineering Conference. The panel explored future datacenter architectures with massive scale, power density, virtualization, and grid management in the context of hyperscale datacenters (an element of the Redshift theory).
As a traditional enterprise that's experienced explosive growth over the years, eBay is at the heart of Redshift. Additionally, eBay implemented Sun's Niagara servers, designed to be eco responsible and reduce power consumption and associated costs in the datacenter.
These trends towards Redshift and eco computing impact the architectural advice that Sun provides to you, the customer, and how you map it back to your business objectives. We're aligning R&D and our top technical resources around these areas to provide you with the best innovation and cost-effective solutions in the market.
As I've said before, I really value this forum as a two-way dialogue. Do please feel free to drop me a line with any comments or questions.
Regards,
Don Grantham
Executive Vice President
Global Sales & Services
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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