You all know that Scott McNealy is chairman, president, and CEO of Sun Microsystems. So when he decides to write an article, it's worth reading it.
These days, he's mad as hell -- or so he pretends. Let's listen to him talking about reducing computing environment complexity.
People are just absolutely going nuts with the complexity of the current computing environment. A recent study shows that about 10% of IT costs are hardware, 10% software, and the rest administration and training.
That's insane. We'd much rather our customers be able to spend that money on computing power, storage capacity, and increased bandwidth so they can do more of what they really want to do, whether it's finishing designs in half the time or discovering intricate patterns in complex data sets.
Today, a system administrator can manage between 15 and 30 systems; it should be 500. System utilization is around 15%; it should be 80%. It takes weeks to deploy a new network service; it should take days or even hours.
Of course, who can disagree with this? McNealy thinks Sun can solve this problem with grid computing. Here comes the sales pitch.
We need to fix those numbers, and we're working on it. An important first step is grid computing. Sun Microsystems powers about 6,000 grids today, and we're adding about 70 installations a week. These grids link departmental or enterprisewide resources, then allocate them according to business goals and priorities. In short, we're helping customers put computing power where it can do the most good.
This is a major shift, the kind of fundamental advance that comes along maybe once a decade. It begins now and will continue over the next several years, encompassing not only virtualization, but also provisioning and policy automation. At the same time, it's an extension of the vision we've had for 20 years -- the network is the computer -- and the emphasis we've always placed on total cost of ownership.
We'll see in the next years how well Sun deliver on this vision. As you know, there is plenty of competition in this market, including the two behemoths, IBM and HP.
Source: Scott McNealy, for InformationWeek, January 27, 2003
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