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.

Besides the technology, one of the interesting things in the storage industry right now is the general consensus that data management needs to be handled by an end-to-end system, not just a storage box. Take virtualization - instead of virtualizing arrays behind a block storage controller, customers might choose to automate storage processes to support server virtualization. And CDP - as Nigel says "A year ago you could swing a cat and hit a CDP product", and now people are approaching CDP more cautiously because they just don't understand their data well enough to know where they need those types of RPOs. BTW, Nigel is a cat person, so no need to call out the SPCA as I don't think he would actually swing one around by the tail. And then there's de-duplication - are you really ready to let a computer decide which data should be deleted? We all still have lots of work to do with our customers before automatic deletion of data - in order to save storage space - will be a reality.

And as my luck would have it, Nigel - a die-hard Yankees fan - came to Boston the one time this year when the Sox are losing and the Yankees winning. He tried hard to rub it in, but then again, the Sox are still over 10 games ahead of those pinheads, oops I mean pinstripes in the AL East. Ha! But Nigel did make an impression on the nice guy who drove us from meeting to meeting: Kevin's parting words were "Finally after all these years of driving, I've met a Yankees fan I like."

Check out the Big is Bad emblem on the tow-hitch - a perfect statement. But this big bad thumper isn't nearly as eco-responsible as our hybrid data storage server at Sun. Our x4500 data storage server holds 24 TB of data in a 4U of rack space, starting at $2/GB. A data storage server that can run any application - right on the storage system itself!

We're building new storage systems like this just because there's too much data in the world. Too much to just shove away on a block storage device and forget about. Too much to simply spool to a tape and ship offsite. Data today matters to more and more people over longer and longer periods of time. Data that has to be accessible when it's needed. You know what that means? It's not so much about how you store it - sure there are tons of options for disk and tape to meet your performance, reliability, scale, etc needs - its really about the applications you use to retrieve it for use again and again...