Sun’s mantra for network computing: Big gain, No pain

STANLEY GLANCY / Singapore

Celestine Tan

COMPLEXITY, consolidation, standardisation, scale-up and scale-out were the buzzwords at the Asia South Data Centre and Storage Media Symposium hosted by Sun Microsystems at Singapore. The message was clear: help customers save huge amounts by simplifying their data centres. This involves everything from choosing the right architecture to consolidating storage.

The right architecture for Sun would involve simplifying design and deployment as well as management and operations of the data centre. Aptly, the theme for the event was ‘Big gain, No pain—Investment Protection for the Data Centre.’

What are the typical issues faced by chief information officers and chief technology officers today? “The top issues for customers would be business continuity, security, revenue generation and cost reduction,” says Kaliprasad Naidu, director, Infrastructure Solutions, APAC, Sun Microsystems.

Most companies have already made significant investment in creating IT assets, but due to factors like a large variety of non-standard configurations, upgradation of systems has become a serious problem. Most enterprises are still stuck with the one-server, one-application model.

Elaborates Ken Won, director, Enterprise Systems, Products Group, Sun, “Customers are interested in standardisation and in reducing the number of vendors they work with.” Consolidation and standardisation enable remote monitoring and systems administration. Standardisation also reduces the need for a huge support staff at the back-end. Even application deployment is simplified due to standard configurations and common processes.

These are the very issues Sun has been looking at addressing through its recent innovations. Over the last year the company has launched a series of new products and solutions, all intended to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO) for the enterprise customer. The effort has mainly been on introducing products that can be integrated for its customers—be it the Java Desktop System, Java Enterprise System, Java Mobility System or the now famous Java Card System. This means that the products should not only work together but that they should also work with standard-based products from other companies. Incidentally, Sun is among the top 15 global companies when it comes to investing in R&D. According to Celestine Tan, director of marketing, Asia South, the company has spent $1.9 billion in R&D activities.

Sun seems especially aggressive about its recent innovation, chip multi threading (CMT). Throughput computing or CMT is expected to more than double processor performance as it focuses on increasing the amount of work a processor does instead of focusing on clock speed. The company believes the way to do this is by dealing with the memory latency problem. When a thread must wait for memory, the affected core will simply start processing another thread. With a CMT processor there are multiple individual threads of execution. What this means is that when you have more than one thread per processor you can dedicate the threads to individual tasks.

Sun expects to dramatically improve performance by delivering CMT processors. With the release of UltraSPARC IV, the company says it has increased application throughput by at least twice compared to today’s processors. Over the next couple of years, Sun plans to work on introducing radical CMT designs that will provide up to 15 times the application throughput of current processors.

But the company has no plans of stopping at that. Moving beyond 2005, Sun is looking at shipping system processors that will do 30 times as much. This gels perfectly with Sun’s strategy of reduced TCO for the customer while doing away with complexity.