Four thousand Sun engineers invaded the Paris and Bally's Hotels in Las Vegas earlier this week. Engineers usually act on the basis of logical deduction, a faculty that has seemingly limited application on the Las Vegas Strip. However, our collective presence (for the annual Sun Customer Engineering Conference) has not influenced the rampant speculation in the casinos one whit.

The northernmost hotel on the Las Vegas Strip is the Stratosphere. After a couple of days at the general sessions, breakout sessions and the UltraSPARC T2 based systems launch, i feel like I have been launched into the stratosphere. The heady feeling that one gets when surrounded by fellow professionals from around the world is something that will last for a while, I suspect.

The theme of the conference is Shift : Our Universe, Our World, Your Move. A key trend influencing Sun's technology directions is what we believe to be an imminent shift in the applications that will fuel demand for compute infrastructure. Application areas that our customers regard as their competitive weapons and that will scale massively will outstrip workloads that are cost centres for customers, in their demand for systems, storage, software and associated services. We call such application areas Redshift applications.

Another shift that our world is experiencing, and IT deployments particularly so, is the shift to green - ecologically responsible ways of working and living make economic sense as well as ease the strain on finite natural resources.

These are the shifts that our conference dwells on, and every one of us will be pondering what move (s)he needs to make to tailor our solutions and technologies to a Redshifted, Greener world.

Tags : suncec2007