Data Center Evolution

Over the last 40 years, the data center has gone through a tremendous evolution. From mainframe to distributed computing, the challenges have remained the same: Manage complexity, reduce operational expenses, optimize utilization of assets and make the business and its employees more productive and flexible. Telecommunications, like no other industry, has been a key driver in this evolution. For many years, Sun has been working with our customers to deliver data center consolidation products and services. These are organized around server, storage, network and application consolidation.

Sun recently announced that the UltraSparc T1-based servers will be able to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. This is significantly changing the way data center will be run in the near future. Vendors like VMware have also been working hard at virtualizing data centers and desktops. Sun's Solaris 10 already is an option for running on VMware, and the Sun Blade 8000 will be certified to run VMware ESX Server 3.0.1. With Xen, though, multi-OS virtualization will essentially be built into Solaris.

Google acquires YouTube

I discovered YouTube a little bit over a year ago and thought this was going to change the video network landscape quite significantly. To be very honest, I believed a TV network would have been the acquiring company, because I initially saw parallels with Napster. Video is clearly becoming the de facto digital content on the web and will continue to dominate as innovation brings increased bandwidth and improved digital cameras and phones. Phones will inevitably become the main production and consumption point for video as these innovations take place.
The players around the network triangle are at work again. I wouldn't be surprised to see handset manufacturers integrate software into their devices to facilitate the use of services like YouTube.

Ubiquitous Network Triangle

A picture is worth a thousand words. What are the components of the ubiquitous network? I drew this picture to illustrate the dynamics at play in the new converged network.Three different players are fighting for one customer. Names are self-describing. Historically, the equipment manufacturers used to make the network and handheld equipment but this is now changing. The key question for all these companies is: Who ultimately will control the customer experience? Who will become a commodity?


Now a quiz: Where is Google on this picture? Apple? Yahoo? RIM?