Is This Where Sun Will Shine? :: AO

Is This Where Sun Will Shine?

The second is to focus on driving the complexity out of server side infrastructure, which for CIOs is getting more complex and more expensive. If you’re a CIO, you’re going to invest in directory security and identity technologies because you’re worried about system access and provisioning. You’re going to invest in Web services infrastructures, such as portals and application servers, and Web servers and integration technologies. You’re going to invest in communication and cooperation, email pin messaging, calendaring. And then finally, you’re going to invest in an operating system, which although it’s gone a little out of style, is ever more important in today’s environment. Now look at each of those four broad areas where you’re investing: you license directories by the entry; you identify AP servers by the CP, messaging and communication by the number of mailboxes or calendars, and the operating system by the box, and the file system by the terabyte, etc. And the only point behind outlining all of those is to show that it’s a mess. It’s very difficult for any CIO to get their hands around it.

And so when we looked at really taking the complexity and expense out of that operating platform, we came up with Project Orion. It’s a new strategy on three fronts. First and foremost is synchronizing all of the releases of our technologies on the server side. There will be four releases a year of all system software at Sun. And we will match up all of those products we just talked about with the Solaris release trains, and once a quarter you will get an update that provides forward compatibility of all these basic service infrastructure elements. That makes it a very economic platform to deploy.

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We have an effort underway called N1 which is all about automating the heterogeneous data center. Taking Hewlett-Packard equipment, IBM equipment, Dell equipment, Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP Lex, and allowing CIOs to really begin operating those at a level of efficiency that they’ve never been able to achieve historically. In essence, our N1 vision is a very simple concept: a computer should be responsible for air traffic control in the data center. If you want to get more performance, more durability, and lower costs, then you should ask your computer to figure out how to make that happen. N1 is the system that does all that thinking, and does all the analysis to make sure you can run provision data centers