185 Winding Steps

The Tiny Data Center

The Huge Lantern

Here's what I learned from the placards inside the lighthouse: From it's start in 1846, the Gibbs lighthouse keeper wound a 1200 pound weight by hand every 30 minutes to revolve the lighthouse lens. The lantern itself was originally kerosene. In 1964 electrical equipment was installed, and today the whole lighthouse process works automatically: computers maintain the light, and the APC equipment and a diesel generator make sure it keeps shining even during terrible storms that bring power outages. Which is pretty important given that 39 ships were wrecked off the Western end of Bermuda in the decade before the lighthouse was constructed. Now that's a mission-critical data center!

Additionally the lighthouse stands on a hill that is 245 feet, and the lighthouse itself is 117 feet tall, which is why it can be seen from 40 miles away. And I can personally attest to the fact that most of Bermuda can be seen from the top of the lighthouse. Gibbs Lighthouse - where data center truly meets the cloud.

My view from top, facing west

Every year in our IT industry we enthusiastically embrace a different buzzword as the panacea of IT. Recall grid, virtualization and ILM – all laudable technologies that solve IT problems, but not fitting the definition of panacea. This year the buzzword seems to be cloud.

I'm an ardent fan of technological innovation – without it we're missing one of the most important ways to truly change the world in which we live. And I believe cloud is game-changing technology. Being a true geek, I'm genuinely excited about the potential cloud offers in changing the IT landscape dramatically: if done right it doesn't matter how compute, network, and storage interact inside a cloud... leaving broad room for innovation that would be considered too disruptive in today's datacenter... paving the way for a new generation of applications that will solve problems many of us haven't even thought of yet.

Yet cloud is no panacea. It takes hard work to solve IT problems: scale, security, compliance, data portability, privacy and so on. In addition the use of cloud requires changes to IT process and organization, with risk around every corner. But there's reward in embracing clouds – reward in using IT to enable businesses to enter new markets more quickly, using cloud to reduce IT costs through economies of scale, and in changing those age-old financial conversations around capital and expense.

But it takes expertise, experience, and insight to figure out how to apply cloud technologies to meet the IT challenges of today and tomorrow. Which is why our Sun Professional Services team, who have been working with customers to make their IT environments as efficient as possible, will also help customers figure out where cloud fits in their IT roadmaps. It's a perfect match – PS experts who understand where cloud technology is going and who work every day to build efficient datacenters, helping to determine where cloud fits in customer's IT roadmaps.

So if the question is “How do I get the most efficient IT environment to run and grow my business - both today and tomorrow?”, our PS experts can help determine where cloud fits in the answer - for both today and tomorrow.

Why is ROM a good option for IT right now? We all know the world today is always on, has an insatiable appetite for information, and expects service at it's fingertips. And this means IT shops are under more pressure than ever - pressure to focus on strategic initiatives to grow business while shrinking IT costs at the same time. How do you free up IT for new projects when 70-80% of the IT budgets and the majority of IT staff are taking care of legacy infrastructure? Remote Operations Management for efficient processes and variable financing models.

Who should customers turn to for help? Certified ROM experts with expert tools. You want a vendor with years of experience, with technical and IT service management (e.g.; ITIL) certifications, with a knowledge base built from experience. You don't want to be the first customer of an inexperienced remote management vendor.

Where does your remote operations vendor need to be? Everywhere - a ROM vendor needs to have global, local, and ubiquitous presence. So many businesses have global or multinational needs - your ROM vendor must have multiple Network Operation Centers (NOCs) in multiple locations - able to serve round the globe and round the clock. And service is a people business - you need local language support and local law compliance - so your ROM vendor must have a local presence as well. And transparency is a must - meaning you as a ROM customer must have ubiquitous access to see how your ROM vendor is doing - make sure you have portal access to see your environment from anywhere.

What should you turn over to a ROM vendor? Anyone in IT knows that the outsourcing model of the early 2000's - where IT turned over the keys to the entire datacenter to outsourcing vendors - just didn't work. It left IT with little control over their own destiny, with little ability to align with changing business needs. A much better strategy is selective sourcing - "a strategy that treats IT as a portfolio of activities, some of which should be outsourced and others of which should be performed by internal staff. In other words, decide what's critical to differentiate and manage it internally; decide what's becoming commodity IT and look to selectively source it".

When will a vendor help you with your selective sourcing? Certainly it needs to be on your terms - do you need interim management to help through a spike in your IT needs? Are you building a new application and want someone else to manage the infrastructure? Do you need someone to take over some of your legacy environment - to help increase availability and scale? A true selective sourcing vendor will take on any of these circumstances - dictated by your needs not by their demands.

Quite often the 5W's are accompanied by 1H. Once you get the 5W's out of the way in your analysis of remote operations management services, the How moves to front and center. So How? Just take a look at how Sun Remote Operations Management has answered these questions for other customers. And then let our ROM team lead the way.

I'm not green around the gills or even green with envy. I'm feeling Eco-Green! Today Sun was named to the Uptime Institute's Global Green 100 list. For three great green reasons:

Sun Booth at the Uptime Institute Symposium

• We focus on building server, storage and software products that are sustainable. Some of my favorites are the new Open Network Systems announced earlier this week (using the killer Intel Nehalem processor at 30% less power for compute, and integrated flash at 38% less power/GB) and of course the virtualization built right into Solaris and OpenSolaris. Cuz we all know that most servers are drastically underutilized - like maybe by 85% - meaning lots of the power they consume and heat they put off is a complete waste. I'm also a fan of virtualized desktops - although the SunRay in my office throws off so little heat I have to wear gloves to keep my hands warm.

• We've consolidated our Sun datacenters into eco-friendly environments, using next-gen power and cooling systems - saving 60% in power load. It took a lot of ingenuity to build those new datacenters - ingenuity fueled by the innovative minds at Sun.

• And we've built professional services expertise around that innovation. So now we're building eco-friendly datacenters for our customers - helping them to be as green as we are.

Which means next year I expect to see our customer names on the Global Green 100 list too.

Which brings me to our announcement yesterday. Keeping data for long periods of time is important these days. Of equal importance is truly destroying data as required by internal corporate erasure or regulatory policy. That's why we developed a new on-site service to help customers with this challenge. Our experts delivering the new Sun Data Protection Data Erasure service will work with customers to ensure their erasure policies are compliant.

Now back to Thanksgiving: tomorrow we will give thanks for our baker's pie-making expertise while we erase those four pies.

This week I watched with interest India's launch of their first lunar orbiter, the Chandrayaan-1. My favorite part of any launch is watching Ground Control go from absolute, deadly-serious silence to uncontrolled, jumping joy when their rocket leaves the tower and earth's atmosphere. The success of the mission is down to the knowledge and expertise of this team on the ground. They may never be famous or fly into outer space but without their collective know-how and experience the Chandrayaan-1 would not be a reality.

I was thinking how similar this is to what happens with our Professional Services team. They've taken our leading datacenter technologies like the Solaris 10 OS, LDOMs, and CoolThreads, with our over 25 years of expertise in datacenter strategy, design and build to create Sun's Datacenter Efficiency Practice.

This is because we've found our customers facing a space, power and cooling crunch - not enough floorspace for their expanding datacenters, not enough throughput/power to meet current and near-future performance demands, and utility costs and cooling costs sometimes exceeding the cost of server acquisition. And while many companies faced the same types of datacenter problems, we knew that the solutions need to be tuned to each company's unique business and IT requirements. So we start with Datacenter Strategy Consulting to review our customer's datacenter floorspace, cooling facilities, power requirements, hardware and software, network, and security needs. We then can recommend retrofitting and optimization of current datacenter, or a Sun Modular Datacenter (the always cool Project Blackbox) or building a new facility (like we did, check out this video about our own energy-efficient datacenter in Santa Clara).

And once you have an expert datacenter strategy, you need expert datacenter design. Sun uses a modular or "pod" design that groups racks having the same requirements. Pods create a standard within the datacenter that make the design repeatable and scalable for future growth. We design all our datacenters, whether retrofitted, modular or a new build-out, with energy-efficient equipment and technologies, and green building design concepts. Datacenter Build also means installation and configuration of equipment and readiness services. At its completion your datacenter maximizes space utilization, maximizes energy-efficiency, and minimizes costs.

Sun's Datacenter Efficiency Practice - think of us as the Mission Control to your successful datacenter launch. This is the rocket science of data centers.

That's the thing about being in service. You have to anticipate your customer's needs; you have to put yourself in their shoes (or state of hunger); and you can't always expect much in return (yup, I did forget to pay her back... oops).

Surrounding Sun's product innovation with Service innovation to solve our customer's key challenges. That's what we do in Sun services. Server, storage, and software installation, configuration and support. Helping our customers assess, architect, implement, and optimize their IT solutions, in a heterogeneous world. Managing our customer's infrastructure for them. Learning Services to help teach about how our products and services work within our customer's network infrastructures. We also offer Sun Financial Services to provide financing options for Sun products and services (maybe I can get a loan to finance my NY sandwich).

That's Sun Service... with a smile.