I handle public relations for Greg, and saw your post on Redshift. Speaking for myself (and not Greg), I agree that Sun isn’t there yet. Then again, nobody else is, either, or Google would buy hardware from them.

What we’re doing is directing Sun’s $2 billion / year in R&D to solve these issues — what we call “brutal efficiency at massive scale.” For example, check out the efficiencies in Project Blackbox (www.sun.com/blackbox). That’s just a starting point.

Regardless, definitely agree with your main point, and looking forward to Part II tomorrow!

Andreas

P.S. For the record, Salesforce.com: http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2001-12/sunflash.20011204.1.xml
And Twitter:
http://twitter.com/blog/2007/06/under-hood-at-twitter.html

So while there’s certainly room to improve, our record is better than suggested above

Good points all – thanks for your thoughts regarding my initial post on redshift computing. Correction noted with regards to salesforce.com – must be due to my advancing age … heck, I was happy to remember dinner last night! Having said that, it did bring to mind this post by Dan Farber which followed a couple of notable salesforce.com outages.

At any rate, thanks for joining the conversation, & pass the word to any who have something to contribute. Thx!

Bob

Thanks for the mention in your Blog following the story. While it may seem awkward that I mentioned a number of companies that are not using Sun technology, I did so deliberately. Understand that it would be easy to make a 100% Sun argument, but then it is only looking at the world through Sun-colored glasses and the reality is that this is a trend that is happening with or without Sun. Interestingly enough, when you think of the companies that have exploited high-bandwitch plays and truly bet on the network – the ones that have used commodity-type, whitebox solutions have all run into serious issues because the systems weren’t built for scale, space, power, etc. And while the Google, YouTube and MySpaces of the past could manage through that then, the competition is so hot now why risk it? The reality is that the edge of a 5 computer world is more “in your face” type of a statement and we will see a number of pools and farms across the globe. And of those new companies sprouting up, I see Sun having a solid position as the partner of choice given our drive to invest in technology growth and platforms at all layers of the network.

Regardless, thanks for the post. Keep it going with Appistry, cool technology enabling this new world of computing.

Cheers,
peder

As evidence of this, take a look at the Black Box project. The creative side of the brain came up with a very interesting idea – a mini data center delivered anywhere in the world as a standard shipping container. Great. Unfortunately, though, the logical side then screwed it up. Insisting that servers are the critical deliverable, more than a third of the space in the Black Box is dedicated to human access to the servers. You can bet Google didn’t make such a mistake with their container project.

At Google scale servers are like light bulbs in a warehouse. When one fails, it’s a non-event. It’s simply powered down automatically. No one scrambles to reboot it or look for a replacement. And, like the light bulb, it’ll get addressed as part of a batch by the janitorial staff some weeks or months later.

Also: will Sun learn to love selling lots of commodity-priced hardware? They seemed to have great reluctance facing the Linux threat, which was very ugly to their traditional business model. Do they plan to out-Linux Linux in the realm of super-cheap commodity servers?

- Bob