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February 2, 2006 1:44 PM PST
Sun forecasts end to 'Frankenstein' computing
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But McNealy acknowledged there are major impediments to the change.
"We want to be a provider of computing or infrastructure supplier to service providers. One of our frustrations is that service providers have been dinosaurically slow," he said.
Cultural problems also interfere.
"The anthropology is the one big issue. We've been working with a very, very large bank. For nine months we've been trying to work with terms and conditions and liabilities. The purchasing department is trying to specify the chain-link fence that goes around the server," McNealy said with some exasperation. "Finally we said, 'Screw it. We're going to find someone else.'" When Sun walked away from the table, the bank's business unit intervened with the purchasing department, and now talks have resumed, McNealy said.
Papadopoulos also pointed to problems that Sun's having setting up its grid, which the company has announced on more than one occasion but that still isn't publicly available.
"We're in the third architectural revision of the physical infrastructure below and the container management and billing and security and job isolation on top. It's really hard," Papadopoulos said. "It's a lot harder than we thought."
Retail or wholesale?
Sun's internal grid effort is designed to stimulate service providers into moving faster, McNealy said. "We're out irritating the market a bit."
But he recognized that Sun's effort might not go over well with service providers thinking of competing products. Therefore, Sun eventually hopes to fade into the background.
"Ultimately, our preferred answer is that we become a wholesaler," McNealy said. "We don't want to be in the subscriber management business or constomer care business. We're not structured to answer the calls. We don't have big billing engines to do microbilling. We don't have a consumer brand."
But Sun hopes to remain relevant in the world of software as a service, Papadopoulos said. Open-source software is common for software distributed as bits, but network services use proprietary technology. Sun expects its grid work will bring some openness to the idea.
The company hopes that communities developing new services--testing a Web-crawling algorithm that powers a search engine, for example--will use the Sun Grid. There they can publish not just their software source code but also prototypical services, he said.
4 comments
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I'd imagine Sun would "rent" or "lease" the Network Computers, most likely a low-end PC running some version of Unix and then VNC or something else to connect over the Internet or their own Network to the Servers in the Frankenstein project which provide the processing power, storage, software, and web applications as a service.
Quite frankly I could see Small Businesses doing this with Linux and Xen running on the servers and allowing virtual Linux, Darwin, Solaris, *BSD, etc systems and software and web applications as a service with available technology already out there and Open Source Software. All they would need is the capital to make their own high end Linux servers, and search for OSS solutions to doing the same thing Sun is doing. Imagine what companies will do once Red Hat Fedora Core 5 has Xen built into it? They could run their own servers and buy cheap $100 used PCs with network cards and install Linux on them and use VNC to connect to their Fedora Xen servers and save a bundle by not going with Sun or the big guns with this type of thing. Of course they would need to pay a Linux Administrator to keep it running, but it could be cheaper than paying Sun for the services.
Ironically this is yet another shot by Sun to try and take out Microsoft. The Network Computer didn't do it, getting Java on every OS did not do it, making a Java based OS did not do it, now they want something that can challenge the Windows Terminal Server software with a Dotcom Google-Like twist to it.
I think that Sun would do better if they spent some money on developing Linux or ReactOS to help those OSS projects compete with Microsoft Windows. Maybe help port Openstep to Linux and ReactOS? Maybe help make them better and more user friendly? Maybe merge Linux with OpenSolaris?
because it was a piece of junk. Maybe it's gotten
better but I believe that it's core ideas are
fundamentally flawed. Given even a modest amount
of network bandwidth, I'll take X11 to remotely
display applications. My guess is that Sun would
probably opt for a Sunray type of solution. I
really don't know much about Sunray technology
but I've been told it works well.
Regardless of the how the apps get displayed the
future of business computing probably will be
done on leased grid or services computers. It
makes sense as it will lower the cost for businesses. Application service providers make
a lot of sense.