Russ Smariga's Weblog

Stephen Baxter and Optimi-what? in the Data Center On an intensely sunny, crisp spring day (well, it is almost spring) here in Southlake, TX, it occurs to me that this is a pretty exciting time to involved in technology. No, this is not a marketing pitch by Sun --- remember the disclaimer: These are my words, and not the words of my employer --- even though I gave you a pointer to some official Sun information, these are just some observations by an interested participant. There have been lots of cool, new technology things popping onto the scene pretty much since the early / mid '80s when the PC first began to hit the streets. And that has all been (mostly) well and good. Those things were useful, as far as they went, or, at the least, they were entertaining. Businesses leveraged the technology to develop or extend their competitive position. Some have done this very much better than others. And, big companies that make all manner of server and client hardware, software of all descriptions, and the services to glue it all together have long been touting the 'fact' that life will now be easy with the Extra-Xeooomba Mark II. Deep down, we have all wanted to believe that this would be the case with each next new thing. And, deep down, we have probably all had the knowledge that this would not, in fact, be the case. Life in technology architecture, design, deployment and operations would continue to present lots of unpredictable challenges and stumbling blocks. This has been particularly true wrt data center operations. Outages seem to jump at us at the most inopportune, most visible, and most expensive moments. What excites me today, though, is the realization that all the myriad technologies, components, architectures, management processes and techniques are finally being looked at as part of some larger, more complete entity, which, when discovered, will be that 'new thing' which really does deliver on a significant part of the promise to make life easier. This vision, which some have had for a bit longer than others, is starting to be accepted by a larger and larger proportion of our community. In Sun's Client Solutions organization (formerly "PS"), we have been developing this vision and executing against it, in smaller or larger ways, over the past 4-6 years. And, only over the last six months have we given it a name: The Sun(TM) Serviced Optimized Data Center (SODC) program. For me, it has been very interesting watching this come about, participating in delivery to customers, and seeing the mindshare around it grow. All of us are a part of the transformation going on now, and, someday, we will look back on the first decade of the 21st century and say, "I was there when this all got started!" So, we can now begin to see a true optimized, efficient enterprise data center emerging, where before we could only see disparate, and most times costly parts. A very good friend of mine, KG, put this to me a couple of days ago. He said: "During my travels I have had this persistent thought that hits me on elevators. Stephen Baxter mentioned it in 'Manifold Origin' concerning how the primitives could not see the wrecked spacecraft because they could not comprehend it. I return to this thought whenever I am on elevators. Wondering how a human being from ancient times would describe an elevator. They would see it, but their minds would build a construct to describe it in their own language/rule set." KG finishes with this question which, on this bright, cool day, seems particularly applicable to our world of emerging, converging technology: "what is it that is there that we don't see because we cannot comprehend it?" Cheers, - RussS