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‘By 2012 we will not require a data center’
Reducing IT costs without compromising on productivity enhancements seems to be right on top of the agenda of most global conglomerates. Network Computing correspondent Ashwani Mishra, who recently caught up with Senior VP and CIO of Sun Microsystems, Robert Worrall, found that Sun is no exception.
As a CIO, how did you ensure that IT brought productivity gains not merely within your organization but also outside it?
Ever since Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) came into his role at the company we have started looking at IT in a different manner. In fact, in several meetings, Jonathan referred to me as the Chief Productivity Officer (bursts out laughing). I think it is an interesting connotation because IT has a key role in end-user productivity.
Pushing our thin-client strategy has been one of the major approaches to increasing productivity. We have about 5,000 thin clients deployed primarily in the US within homes. They allow people to work seamlessly between home and office.
In addition, we have got away with some of the old infrastructure and traditional desk-side bone, and moved to things like using Skype accounts and laptops.
We are trying to be as aggressive as we can by reducing IT costs while at the same time supporting user productivity. Every IT initiative that we take needs to have some productivity enhancement associated with it.
What major initiatives have you planned for Sun this year?
The largest initiative that we have this year is our enterprise resource planning consolidation. It is the largest IT initiative that Sun has ever undertaken. Over the next 14 months we have to replace 700 business applications with a single Oracle (Oracle 11i) instance running globally. These 700 business applications translate to about 1,200 application servers scattered around the globe.
The second initiative would be of data center rationalization and consolidation. At present we have eight data centers. We plan to bring it down to three by 2009, then to two and finally zero.
One of the biggest advancements in server virtualization last year was the introduction of instruction sets designed to provide better virtualization support at the hardware level. Going forward, what are your expectations in the virtualization space?
CIOs are looking at methods to virtualize the data center. The question that needs to be addressed is how to deconstruct the applications and convert them into service-oriented applications. This process will eventually allow you to externalize applications outside the data centers. It would be taking virtualization through the next step, which implies moving applications outside of your data centers.
We used to think that data centers would last forever. However, I think that sometime by the year 2010 or 2012 we will not require a data center. This is because of the work that we are doing with virtualization around the applications stack. It will enable us to externalize all the applications over the public Internet and run them with service providers as software-as-a-service and such type of things.
Do you think that providing input / output resources to multiple virtual machines is a challenge to server
virtualization?
It is. Victory will go to whoever in the industry-Sun, HP, IBM or any other vendor-solves the virtualization puzzle first.
All of us are racing towards that goal and solution. Virtualization is still a young industry, and it will take few years before the technologies and services that are available in the market mature to the point where they achieve the dream of externalizing the data center.
Utility computing is another area that has not managed to take off on a large commercial basis. Your views
on this...
Industry-wide, utility computing got off to a rocky start. We raced to the market thinking that it would be a simple offering to the customers. We were wrong.
Utility computing is not about technologies. The technology is simple. The hardest part is the billing. Until the industry solves the billing issue around utility computing it will continue to be a struggling enterprise.
This issue should be sorted out between 2008 and 2010, then you will begin to see it in a more commercial sense.
Power and cooling have been primary limiting factors in the performance of data centers. How do you plan to
create an efficient and eco-friendly data center at Sun?
Eco-friendly is the marketing buzzword of the moment. For a CIO it translates into energy and cost savings, and every CIO in the world would understand this (smiles).
We are applying much of our technology to achieve some radical data center reduction targets. For example, we are in the process of closing the facility we had in the Netherlands (outside Amsterdam) and moving all the services to a facility that we have outside London.
We are using technologies that will allow us greater footprint reduction, higher energy efficiency, and so on. We estimate that the end-result of this shifting will be about 75 percent reduction in the footprint space (data center space) that is required, plus about 55 percent reduction in our energy bills. Every dollar saved can be re-invested in some other area of business.
We have also announced a project called Blackbox. It is essentially a data center in a shipping container. You take a standard 10-by-20 feet shipping container and stuff it with Niagara boxes. Imagine having one of these containers sitting in your parking lot. In my case, I can replace the entire data center that I have in Colorado with two such containers. This would give us one-fifth of the energy and cooling consumption.
Could you throw some light on Sun’s next-generation proximity communication processors which seek to do away with wire connections?
(Looks at his accompanying colleagues and takes time to reply.) I don’t know if I can answer that question for you. (There is silence again.) Okay. There are some interesting developments coming out from us shortly. It is a sort of teasing the question, “Can you get the data center on the chip?”
A Niagara processor has 32 threads that will move to 64 and ultimately to 256 on a single chip. It is just a matter of time. We will see data centers that once occupied 12,000 square feet fit in a space of 100 square feet.
What are your expectations from a CEO?
Budgetary support. In addition, he should help me to broadcast the role of IT within the organization. IT in a company cannot be the same for all.
The CEO’s support is needed to take the message out to the users to explain why certain investment decisions were made and why certain projects were not funded. Not that I need the CEO to defend my decisions-it just helps when a senior leader is endorsing and supporting the IT initiatives at a company.
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