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20040618 Friday June 18, 2004

An Army of One Armed with Sun

I was walking throught the halls of a customer one day when I was almost overrun by an army of Microsoft System Administrators. They were all wearing shirts that said "Microsoft Desktop Upgrade Team." I learned that every friday they wore their shirts. They had been doing this for over six months and the print on their shirts was starting to fade. How long does it take to deal with desktop upgrades? How much hardware gets upgraded to deal with new operating system? How much do the desktop licenses cost as well as the new "Microsoft Office" licenses? Yes, they trained all of their new users on the new operating system (how much did that cost?). Of course, they were upgrading thousands of power sucking, mini-heater underutilized desktops. Is anyone keeping track of CPU utilization? I bet the average is under 2%. This is the kind of thing that has to make CFO's cringe. To keep costs down, organizations standardize their deskop hardware. The irony is that 90% of the time it is over powered. So in general, they are standardizing on over capacity when the goal is to keep costs down. And this was only one of their many, many campuses.

Let me introduce to you Joe. Joe is my "desktop" system administrator at Sun. Yes, Joe is his real name. My relationship with Joe is very good. Why? Well, I have *never* had my desktop go down. If it wasn't for an email joe sent me saying "log out tonight", I would never know he upgraded me from Solaris 8 to Solaris 9. One day, I got an email saying "if you want an alternative user interface to CDE, log out and click "Gnome" on the login screen. Is Joe my personal sysadmin? No, joe is responsible for all sales offices in southern california. I don't know the exact number of desktops, but I bet it is over 500.

Of course to Sun employees, our desktop is not a energy sucking, noisy mini heater with tons of overcapacity. Its a Sun Ray. My desktop is really running on a server somewhere. Today that server is in the office, in the future it will be in some datacenter somewhere in the US where the harware can be shared between employees on the east coast and west coast leveraging time zones. Today, we have 8 400 Mhz CPU's shared among ~100 Sun Rays with a lot of room to spare. Joe upgrades one server and all of his 100 desktops are upgraded. Joe installs one patch and all 100 desktops are patched. True story: One day I asked joe what he thought of managing Sun Rays. He said "I spend more time managing one office with 35 desktops (which hadn't converted yet to Sunrays) than I do all of the Sun Ray enabled offices ... combined". I like joe because he turned from company overhead to an asset. He is willing to go on a sales call with me to share his story. We have been doing this for 4 years now and Joe has never upgraded (or even touched) a Sun Ray desktop except as a user.

I really, really want to get Joe a t-shirt which says "I am the desktop upgrade team". Joe is truly an Army of One.

(2004-06-18 07:18:34.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Comments:

Good anecdotes. I think the security nightmare involved in locking down N desktops will ultimately force the worldwide community of users that primarily run desktop productivity apps to move towards something like Sun Rays. My area (3-D visualization) will likely be a hold-out for some time to come however, unless someone invents a better way to stream interactive OpenGL with very low latency, if they do, then we too could get significant benefits from pooling resources on large machines. A classic example of this would be to have 10 people sharing a large machine with a few hundred gigabytes of physical memory. Right now we use a small number of public-area machines that provide 4GB to 32GB for large memory visualization tasks. If it was possible for numerous people to do visualization from a large server box in a machine room, then the aggregate physical memory available (and the fact that there are usually only a few people doing this at a time) would make it more affordable to have a machine with tremendous peak memory capacity for analyzing huge simulation trajectories. Once the world gets serious about Sun Ray type desktop boxes, maybe more progress will be made on the visualization side of things.

Posted by John Stone on June 18, 2004 at 03:59 PM PDT #

[Trackback] Connected to my earlier post Significant new blog: Jonathan Schwartz's is a new post from Danese on What's missing from Sun blogs (or, is Executive Blogging enough)? which looks seriously at taking the Sun blogging from "one-to-many communication" to "...

Posted by 42 on June 29, 2004 at 03:54 AM PDT #

this entry is ... well ... a-maze-ing. truly. this very real story and others like it need to be considered in order to null out the *noise* and get directly to the real world facts.

Posted by gonzo on June 29, 2004 at 11:24 PM PDT #

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