Sun's CEO On FOSS and the Cloud 74
ruphus13 writes "Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz continues to promote the use of Open Source, and says the downturn in the economy will only boost the momentum behind FOSS. From his post, 'Free and open source software is sweeping across the vast majority of the Fortune 500. When you see the world's most conservative companies starting to deploy open source, you know momentum is on your side. That's creating massive opportunity for those of us who have pioneered the market, to drive commercial opportunities... We announced just last week that we're building the Sun Cloud, atop open source platforms — from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish. By building on open source, we're able to avoid proprietary storage and networking products, alongside proprietary software.'"
In related news, the Sun-IBM deal proposed last week has been called "anti-competitive" by a tech industry group, while others are speculating on how it could affect Linux and Java.
Still the Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even a watered down version of the cloud, say for storage has inherent security issues. How do you control what data goes where, who accesses it, how do you secure it, etc. If I'm counting on some server to hold all of my data outside of my computer, then god save me if I lose my network connection, or if their servers are compromised. At least if I lose my own data, I know whom to blame.
Re:Still the Cloud? (Score:2, Insightful)
All this cloud nonsense is silly. Most end-users and businesses have invested way too much money in powerful workstations, desktops, and laptops, to justify scrapping them in favor of ultralights depending on cloud computing.
All that shit will be obsolete in two years or less, so this is a non-objection.
It's just a marketing pipe dream.
This part is still true. It's true, however, because mobile always-on internet access is still unreliable and expensive. (You can get it pretty cheap, but it's very bad.)
This company is best positioned for the future (Score:5, Insightful)
So in other words, A high-level spokesperson for [vendor X] is quoted as saying that [recent event] is really good for [vendor X] business, and that recently released [product Y] is positioned perfectly for current market conditions.
What a surprise.
Re:Still the Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is that you don't have much experience in supporting large numbers of "...powerful workstations, desktops, and laptops..." If you did, you wouldn't make such stupid presumptions like thinking that the amount of money "invested" in that hardware is the significant cost associated with operating that hardware and the systems that depend on it.
There are many potential reasons why cloud computing may not be a good fit, but the "waste" of jettisoning legacy hardware is hardly one of them.
Re:Still the Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
All this cloud nonsense is silly. Most end-users and businesses have invested way too much money in powerful workstations, desktops, and laptops, to justify scrapping them in favor of ultralights depending on cloud computing. It's just a marketing pipe dream.
The version of the cloud they are releasing is similar to the Amazon EC2 platform. It is not currently aimed at "workstatinos, desktops and laptops" as you said. The primary focus seems to be for startups and other companies that need an easy way to grow their infrastructure without having to make a big investment in hardware.
One example is a merchant that does 90% of their business around Christmas. Instead of having a rack full of expensive computers in a colo facility sitting 90% idle most of the year, they can expand their capacity just when they need it and save a lot of money.
Sun put up some videos from a recent conference where they annouced the Sun Cloud [sun.com].
It's very cool. Think about all the times you've developed your dream infrastructure and maybe drew it out in Visio or Dia, except when you're adding shapes into your network diagram, actual virtual servers are being deployed.
At least that's what the demonstration shows.
Now lets say you're having a problem with your appllcation and you don't know where it is but you have to do some stress testing to figure it out. You can't do that to your live system.
You can essentially copy and paste your whole production configuration as a test environment, run your tests, profiling, fix your application, then delete the whole setup and never have to pay for it again. You can't do that with real hardware.
You could do the same with a development environment. And it seems you only pay while it's running, so you launch it from 9-5 (ok 11:30ish to 4:19pm) and turn it off the rest of the time to save money. Should be much cheaper than buying twice as many real servers.
Re:This company is best positioned for the future (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still the Cloud? (Score:3, Insightful)
In large companies, you don't run equipment without a service contract.
Typical service contracts run for 3 years. You can continue to pay for support, but at some point you're paying more than it would cost to buy new.
Sun's vague strategy made less vague (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very difficult to get a concrete handle on Jonathan Schwartz' description of Sun's strategy, but not impossible. I don't know why Jonathan prefers generalities rather than actual examples, but it may be either not wanting to give away strategic secrets to competitors, or because it's just such a large company that there's no single example that he thinks stands out.
But there is a strategy. To take MySQL as an example, why spend a billion dollars on a free database?
First, it's both promotion, and a point of contact to get in touch with people who are doing something database-y - and might also want ZFS and Solaris. And maybe it's a pilot project for something that's going to need a lot of servers later - free software has to run on something. It's a combination of marketing and customer relations.
There are two kinds of customers, Jonathan points out - those which need expensive support contracts because their downtime would cost even more, and those who don't. Previously those who don't would by cheaper software, but by making all the important software free, there's no profit in competing at the low end anymore. This is exactly the niche that Microsoft Windows (and other Microsoft products) grew into, eventually displacing more and more Unix (including Sun) and mini/mainframe (DEC, IBM) systems. Free software forms a kind of firebreak around the profit services, preventing small competitors from doing the same thing again. Jonathan Schwartz doesn't actually say anything like this, but it is a side effect of free software, and Red Hat does the same thing. In this sense, buying MySQL and giving away the software preserves Sun profits (small companies can still compete, but by using the same software - MySQL, Linux, Solaris, Apache - they are now interchangeable with Sun, so there's no "Windows lock-in" effect).
Of course, if the software runs best on Sun hardware, all the better. For example, the UltraSPARK T1/T2 systems which run multithreaded workloads so well. Being able to, say, make MySQL more threaded would give them an advantage.
The "cloud computing" thing hasn't been really well defined, but is basically a potential development platform, like web applications. Like many, Sun has been trying for a long time to get the technology right, including a number of Java technologies (remember Jini and JXTA?). The ultimate goal with that is to basically break down the barrier between those "expensive contract customers" and "free software" customers by making "computing services" so flexible and easy that it's no longer a question of either a million dollar contract, or do it yourself - you can define where and how you want to access your computing resources, and exactly how much control you want over them, and just pay for what you want or need. And what you don't want to pay for, you do yourself. Obviously big customers can't be milked forever (the current recession is a big threat).
If there's one characteristic that Sun has displayed, it's trying to be ahead of the curve in the technology market. That means a lot of mistakes, and trying a lot of things in immature, unprofitable markets, with the hopes that when they hit the right thing, they'll make it big by being first. They don't want to be "Microsofted" like IBM was.
The downside is it looks like Sun is doing a lot of insane things, giving up profits in mature areas for "happy thoughts". I won't say whether these strategies are the best or most effective, or premature or just dumb. But of all the original Unix workstation makers, Sun alone is still around and independent. There must be a reason for that.