Sun Cloud
Sun did some great announcements in the cloud space yesterday. What is a cloud or cloud computing? Watch this 4.51 min video and you know the concept. In case you never heard of virtualization you may want to spend another 5 min watching this prior to the above. Our strategy on Cloud Computing is very well described in this video by our Sr. VP Dave Douglas. You may also want to watch the recorded web cast from yesterday when we presented our Cloud concept at the CommunityOneEast Developer Conference in New York. We will be launching our Sun Cloud Storage Service and Sun Cloud Compute Service this summer!
One notion of the cloud is utility computing or what we called grid before, or call it network, using remote computing power on a needs basis. You do not own the hardware, you use power (CPU power in this context) over a data connection just the same as you use electricity or even the phone. You only take a phone in your hands, get a dial tone and start calling, not an awful lot of hardware in your house, no software to update. Wouldn't the same concept be nice for everything you do on a computer today? Just press a button and instantly have the network available to go look something up in the internet?
For me this is the future of computing not only for companies but also for each of us. I really dream of it mostly in those moments when I set up my computer again (usually takes hours to reconfigure everything), when I need to update software or store and backup my data. I really would love a provider do this for me in the most secure way, provide me with the latest software I need in this very moment, have a choice of applications that I could not all purchase myself for use a few times a year. I would be ready to pay a monthly subscription fee – absolutely yes.
Just think that you would never have to buy a computer again, which generally is a waste of money as 2-3 years afterwards you can throw it away and buy a new one. You have a thin client at home that simply does not need any updating and if so your provider just sends you a new one for free like they already do today for ADSL modems.
Already many years back Scott McNealy talked about what he was calling a “big friggin' Web Tone switch”. Still our motto today is “The Network is the Computer”. I really hope that I do not have to dream much more until this vision will really become true. With launching our grid a few years ago we were maybe a bit early but now the whole concept takes root as we see with Amazon Web Services' success.
Posted at
07:39PM Mar 19, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Phones and Music 2G
Big news out there these days, everybody talking about the iPhone that was announced by a nervous Steve Jobs on Tuesday calming down while starting to present the new phone. A phone combined with an iPod that is operated by a next generation, easy to use touch screen, a really Apple like state of the art user interface! Apart from that it offers the recent most advanced features for mail, internet, etc. Most of that stuff you can download to any phone today from Yahoo! Go.
Let's look at the iPhone from the angle “will the network kill the iPod”? It can be looked at as a strategy to prevent exactly this happening. More and more phones already have the ability to play music. Over time the phone will replace the iPod. The compelling advantage of the phone being it offers a connection to the network! The next step could be that iTunes will offer a streaming service to listen to any music on the phone while you go and in addition you may have your iTunes library on the web, with your playlists and your personal music being streamed to your phone and made available anywhere, anytime. Vodafone together with Sony just announced Radio Dj for 3G phones. A really complete service to get to know new music like with last.fm and also the possibility to download music. That's were we're headed and forgive me but I have to mention Sun's motto again: “the Network is the Computer”!
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Posted at
04:24PM Jan 13, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Innovation Matters
I want to point to some interesting blogs and discussions around innovation at Sun. First there is Greg's blog (Greg Papadopoulos Sun's Chief Technology Officer). In his most recent entry he claims that the world will only need five computers. Greg points out that in the future there will be five hyperscale, pan-global broadband computing services giants and Sun's bet is to be one of their major suppliers. On our way to get ready for that being innovative is of significant importance. The huge computing power those companies will demand cannot easily be generated by filling some more racks. Some complex issues need to be resolved, e.g. in terms of space, power supply, cooling and more. He refers to Project Blackbox Sun's latest innovation: computing power in a shipping container. Greg closes with: Engineering for scale matters. Really matters. Read some of the discussion around this hypothesis in Computerworld IT Blogwatch .
Secondly there is the Innovation Blog. Watch the video posted in Driving Innovation! Host Hal Stern (VP of Global Systems Engineering), our CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Greg discuss why innovation matters. I want to go into one aspect they touch on mentioned by Greg before. It is the theory on market segmentation in customers who are over-served by Moore's law and customers who are under-served by Moore's law. Under-served are those who need to grow as their customers demand more computing capacity while the bandwidth of DSL lines is constantly increasing and those who experience hypergrowth as a result of increasing demand for services (e.g. salesForcecom). Greg's prediction is that this latter market segment will grow significantly over the next coming years. And again there is a need of innovation and engineering for scale.
Evidence on growth through bandwidth: in Germany today it is possible in nearly every bigger city to get DSL lines as fast as 16mbits. Who will fill those pipes and with what? Videostreaming, IP telephony, television are possibilities for existing and new companies to grow. YouTube would probably not have been successful if the bandwidth would not have increased.
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Posted at
07:40AM Dec 21, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Sun on YouTube
Yes, we participate in the community, we share our videos! Sun is a registered user at YouTube. Look for SunMicrosystemsInc, registered 4 months ago, age 24. Enjoy some of our commercials, get educated on our products, e.g. Project Blackbox, Computing Power in a shipping container or managed services. Sure I liked the one in German about the Sun Solution Center by Systemhelden.com. I really recommend the series about the IT Guy – a funny advertising campaign about challenges in the datacenter today. Here is the list of what is available.
There is also more serious stuff out there, watch some of our executives discuss the importance of our Operating System Solaris: Does the OS really matter ? (and part 2).
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Posted at
10:47PM Dec 14, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Microprocessor Anniversary
Exactly one year ago we came out with a ground-breaking announcement: Sun Microsystems Introduces Breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 Processor with CoolThreads Technology, Setting a New Industry Standard for Performance, Innovation.
I want this blog to be understood as a glossary. I discovered a blog being a prefect place to collect and share information. Inspired through Dan Berg's technology session in Prague I surfed the web to better understand key words of microprocessor technology. During my time with Advanced Micro Devices I developed some passion around this and since did not get back to some more detailed understanding of where the technology in this area was heading. I hope to have put everything in the right context – as you may know, I am not a techie just working in Human Resources!
Let's start with citing a paragraph out of a whitepaper found on Sun's page for Throughput Computing:
“ ....the disparity between processor speeds and memory access speeds means that memory latency dominates application performance, erasing even very impressive gains in clock rates. While processor speeds continue to double every two years, memory speeds have typically doubled only every six years. This growing disconnect is the result of memory suppliers focusing on density and cost as their design center, rather than speed. Unfortunately, this relative gap between processor and memory speeds leaves ultra-fast processors idle as much as 85 percent of the time, waiting for memory to return required data. Ironically, as traditional processor execution pipelines get faster and more complex, the effect of memory latency grows—fast, expensive processors spend more cycles doing nothing. Worse still, idle processors continue to draw power and generate heat. Its easy to see that frequency (gigahertz) is truly a misleading indicator of real performance.”
This is the problem statement, now how did Sun get it's processors achieve more throughput, say work faster and consume less power? Sounds so simple: by Chip Multithreading (CMT):
“ Unlike complex single-threaded processors, CMT processors utilize the available transistor budget to implement multiple hardware multithreading processor cores on a single silicon wafer or chip. Because these individual processor cores implement much simpler pipelines (emphasizing thread-level parallelism or TLP over instruction level parallelism or ILP), they are also substantially cooler and require significantly less electrical energy to operate. This innovative approach results in CoolThreads processor technology—multiple physical instruction execution pipelines (one for each core), with several active thread contexts per pipeline or core.”
Sun's T1 processor code named Niagara possesses 8 cores or in other words 8 different microprocessors on a single chip or die produced with advanced production technology using 90 nanometer structures (this year it has come down as far as 65 nanometers). Each core is able to process 4 threads in parallel, therefor we talk about 32 systems on one chip.
It is not for nothing that we are on top of the industry with our current systems and more to come! When I look at our innovations I really feel good about the future of Sun. As an example, Robert Drost's invention of Proximity I/O or also known under the term Proximity Communications. Simply speaking if you put two microprocessors backside up close to one another, they communicate via wireless signals, with result of higher speeds and less energy consumption. Really great to have so many bright guys on board!
And what is additionally cool: we opensource even our processor architectures (not only our software!) on openSparc. This makes it easy for other companies to build software and hardware around our systems!
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Posted at
12:35PM Nov 14, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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