Economics of Out-of-the-Box Performance...
Economics - study of how people use their limited resources in an attempt to satisfy unlimited wants.
I have always had a fascination with the Need for Speed and in particular to what extent people will do to attempt to push the boundaries of speed in it's many forms...throughput, latency, etc. However the first part of the definition regarding limited resources has had an increasing impact on the pursuit of performance. The "economics" of performance are being transformed.
Gone are the days of buying a multi-million dollar computer systems that are tuned for a couple of months to be optimized for a few applications that ran on it and also gone is the ability to spend months optimizing and tuning the application(s) for the particular idiosyncracies of the system they are being run on. Those specialized systems are being replaced with general purpose computers with "server consolidation" and "resource virtualization" becoming more and more popular. Additionally there has been a huge drive for horizontal scaling using lots of "cheap" (/disposable/replaceable/etc.) servers with cost to tune a system likely exceeding the value of the system in the first place.
The expectation has essentially shifted from buying a drag racing car to the out-of-the-box performance of a rally car or even a BMW M-series sedan. Customers have limited resources in terms of expertise, deployment time and engineering bandwidth but still expect to maximize the performance and utilization of the resource that they buy. Out-of-the-box performance can only be achieved by introducing flexibility and intelligence into the system to dynamically adjust to the needs of the customers applications including in hardware, drivers, operating system, compilers, applications, etc.
Also a critical element of out-of-the-box performance is eliminating the need for tunables. Can you achieve better performance for a particular application (or number of applications) with alot of tunables? We need only look back to the defination of economics to answer that the question itself is not relevant. Given the limited resources of customers and their unlimited wants the only answer is that the tuning must be dynamic to meet the many needs of many customers simultaneously. The economics for Sun is that "out-of-the-box" performance is becoming part of our engineering lifestyle and we strive to acheive the goal that out-of-the-box performance will exceed that of any manually tuned system.
