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

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.

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.