David Weaver

SWaP in the real world?

As a Sun employee, I'm "supposed" to be saying good things about Sun's products and marketing efforts, right? Last month, I expressed a doubt, and someone from outside the company gave me a quick education on the "real world".

As we were launching the new UltraSPARC T1-based systems in early December, I attended an Sun-internal presentation on the new systems. I heard about a new system metric (Performance / (Space x Watts)) with which competing system configurations could be compared, and a cool on-line tool (http://SimDataCenter.sun.com) that could compare in real-time how various system combinations (both Sun's and competitors') would affect Performance, Space, Watts, Cooling, etc. I wasn't so sure that the full three-variable metric made sense in the real (that is, customers') world. A couple of days later, I commented to a friend who's an outside industry consultant a slight cynicism, that I suspected that most customers only cared about two out of those three measures (with different customers caring about different pairs).

Boy, did I get an earful and a quick education -- customers do care about all three. A client of his had just the day before asked him to help them plan out a refit of a whole datacenter -- which could not add any floor space, power, and cooling for the remainder of 2006, and oh-by-the-way they needed a 1.5x to 2x increase in processing power (throughput) this year. It turned out that Sun's new UltraSPARC T1-based systems were the only way to fulfill those requirements ... and with space, power, and performance to spare.

I'm sold. Bring on "SWaP".

Posted at 03:04PM Jan 11, 2006 by dweaver in Sun  |