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.

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.

It was close to lunchtime when my iphone buzzed with the SMS: “Want some FUD?” I had to laugh; while my teenagers are specialists in the new lingo – this errant 'Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt' message from a co-worker was actually an abbreviation for "food". But seeing FUD on my phone's screen reminded me of the months before Y2K – I was working in IT for a telco, and we were feverishly updating all our server equipment to ensure we wouldn't run into the dreaded short date format issues.

Scroll forward 9 years. Here we are, and IT shops are looking at their aging server and storage inventory – many acquired in '99 with Y2K budgets, many facing end-of-service-life, many not meeting current or projected performance demands, costing too much for power and cooling and taking up too much datacenter floorspace.

With the efficiency and consolidation options available today, it's easy to make the case that it's cheaper to move to a new server than stay on the old. So why does anyone hesitate in moving from their older systems? FUD – think of all the issues with moving to something new: painful learning curve, disruption, customized software, ISV apps. Will moving cause costly interruptions to business?

Sun offers two solutions to take the FUD out of datacenter upgrades:

1. Solaris 8 and 9 Containers;
2. Sun Professional Services.

Solaris 8 and 9 Containers are virtual environments for hosting Solaris 8 and 9 applications on a Solaris 10 box. They provide a Solaris 8 and 9 runtime environment with all the performance and quality improvements of the Solaris 10 OS (DTrace, ZFS, Solaris Resource Manager). Now you can upgrade hardware in one stage and your applications in another. Less pain, more time to plan. Containers are a "transition tool" to help port applications to Solaris 10 in comfortable stages (watch this great video with the great Joost Pronk in which he explains Solaris Containers).

And to go with our Containers we have our experts - Sun Professional Services. Our migration team analyzes your original Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 environments, creates a migration plan, and implements and tests solutions as stand-alone projects. Professional Services can easily test, implement and optimize future system and network architectures for our customers (like Barmer Ersatzkasse), while protecting their prior qualification efforts.

No worries. Sun, we take the FUD out of migration. Now if I could just get some lunch.

Yesterday I participated in the Sun Analyst Series (SAS) with Peter Ryan (Sun's EVP of Global Sales and Services), Ingrid Van Den Hoogen (Sun's Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing) and Dave Douglas (Senior V.P. of Network.com and now leading Cloud Computing and Developer Programs, and Sun's Chief Sustainability Officer - I really believe he has the longest title at Sun).

It was a good day. We talked with industry analysts about Sun's strategy for growth (software infrastructure, HPC, enterprise virtualization and consolidation, developer community growth and cloud computing), our new business groups (System Platforms, Application Platform Software, and Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms), and changes within marketing (product and technology marketing are now fully embedded directly into the product groups). Ingrid outlined the changes at Sun and how they'll help us moving forward. Peter talked about how Sun's innovations continue to set us apart (and ahead) of other companies. Dave gave a glimpse of cloud computing at Sun and I spoke about all the great things we do in Sun Services - oh, can I mention again that we have a great remote operations management business? As I said, it was a good day. We had a lot of good conversations. Answered a lot of good questions.

Today at Sun we're all bouncing off the walls because today Sun launches the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Series (code name "Amber Road"), the world's first open storage appliances. Words like "disruptive", "revolutionary", "transformative" and "radical" have been used to describe the new Sun Storage 7110, 7210, and 7410 Unified Storage Systems. Deserved or hype? I can think of three things off the bat that argue for deserved:

• an Open Architecture
• ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools and
• unprecedented, unheard of Storage Analytics.

ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools are storage stacks made from a mix of DRAM, Flash/SSD and SATA. ZFS manages this storage hierarchy as one transparent pool optimizing it to leverage the best attributes of each device. This optimization means the best performance (at about 25% the cost of traditional storage) and best energy-efficiency possible. ZFS's optimizations yields a 3.2 times faster Read IOPS, 11% faster Write IOPS and a 2 times faster raw capacity. ZFS not only optimizes for speed it also constantly runs data integrity checks to prevent any data corruption. It's not only fast, it's good.

Storage Analytics The 7000 Class Systems has a browser user interface (BUI) that radically simplifies administration tasks like configuration, maintenance (including hardware), checking shares (the 7000 line exports files systems as shares) and status (current usage of CPU, memory, storage, network, services, hardware, CIFS, NDMP, NFSv3 and v4, and iSCSI - it's pretty comprehensive and all on one page!) and, most wonderfully, DTrace analytics. In the storage world robust analytics on workloads in production just haven't existed. Now an administrator is able to look at a problem in real time - all while systems continue running in production. The Storage Analytics uses a drill-down analysis - checking the higher level statistics first and then going into finer detail based on previous findings. So, for example, things are moving along smoothly and suddenly performance is bad. With the Storage Analytics you can now ask: How many IOPS is the system doing? Which clients are causing a spike in IOPS? Let's say it's a CIFS protocol causing the problem; from that data point you'll then drill down and ask, Which Windows Client is going crazy? Is it doing more reads or writes? Which file is it reading or writing to? Before you would have been stopped at the second question. Now life is good. An administrator can quickly identify and diagnose system performance issues, and debug storage and network problems. Find it quick and fix it quick without shutting anything down. Pretty amazing. So far ahead of anything else available, you might even call it disruptive.

Sun doesn't stop at great open architecture, open storage appliances, revolutionary features like ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools, and get-it-no-where-else Storage Analytics. Sun follows up the 7000 class systems with great services. Our Professional Services is ready to help your storage migration with our Sun Unified Storage Data Migration Service. Sun's experts will migrate your storage systems quickly and securely saving you time and bringing you the full benefits of all the 7000 series features.

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.

It's October... it's the postseason... and Sun's new T5440 Server gets me thinking about the Red Sox. Bit of a stretch? Not at all. Think back to last Monday's ALDS game. The rookie - the newest guy on the team - Jed Lowrie- brought in the winning run against the Los Angeles Angels to win the game and the first-round playoff series. Same thing with the T5440 Server – Sun's newest server - paving an entirely new way in the industry, setting an all time new bar, the "way of the future" for servers.

I'm a baseball junkie... I love stats and the T5440 Server's are impressive:
• one to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus Chip Multi-threaded Technology (CMT) SPARC processors running at 1.2 or 1.4 Ghz with 8 cores,
• up to 256 threads,
• 4 SAS disks and 8 PCIe slots,
• offers a total of 512 GB memory in its 8 GB FB-DIMM Sockets,
• 4 GbEthernet interfaces on the motherboard
• supports up to 128 LDOMs

What does all this get you? Only the highest throughput (up to 4 times higher performance) in the smallest space (a 4 RU chassis) with the lowest power requirements (2 times higher performance per Watt) in the industry. What else? You get a system on a chip – integrated directly on the processor: networking, security and PCI-Express I/O. Built-in, no-cost LDOMs and Solaris Containers virtualization technologies to consolidate workloads. The industry's most open platform built on open source technologies and open standards. You get breakthrough performance, eco-efficiency and cost savings. If I weren't superstitious, I'd say it was like winning the series. But I'll wait a few weeks for that.

Now our favorite rookie Lowrie wasn't on the diamond alone Monday night. He had the Red Sox's experienced veterans Jason Varitek, Kevin Youkilis, Tim Wakefield and Big Papi right alongside him; he's part of an amazing team.

Just like the T5440 Server - part of a great team too. It has the extensive experience of Sun's award-winning Services on its side. Sun's installation, support, training, professional and managed services allow customers to get the most from their T5440 Server. Sun's Professional Services can help with migrating applications and optimizing energy usage, virtualization and performance. Sun's Managed Services give expert help on the day-to-day operational tasks of your IT infrastructure reducing down-time and improving business efficiency and service levels.

There's a live chat taking place with Jonathan Schwartz, John Fowler, EVP Systems, Masood Heydari, VP SPARC Volume Systems, and Jim McHugh, VP Solaris, on Monday October 13th at 10am PT - to register, go to sun.com/launch. You can see a recent video on the launch at This is Something and can hear the webcast replay, download whitepapers or get more info at sun.com.launch. Finally, to see how the T5440 will perform in your environment with your apps, you can try it out for FREE for 60 days WITH FULL TECH SUPPORT. And you can then buy it at 40% off. Visit Sun's Try and Buy for all the details.