Feature Story

By Chip Brookshaw

January 2, 2008 - What do the coming years have in store for the technology industry? Journalists and analysts gathered last month to hear the thoughts and predictions of Sun executives about emerging trends--and how Sun is prioritizing its investments and resources to participate in the changes.

Sun's Greg Papadopoulos and fellow Sun executives John Fowler, Bob Worrall, Chris Melissinos, and Subodh Bapat hosted the Innovation and Trends Dinner to offer their insights on current technology trends, as well as a few surprising predictions.

The Era of the Massive Global Datacenter

All of the speakers remarked on how the emergence of massive, global datacenters is driving major changes in the technology industry:

• The emergence of Internet applications, rich new services, and high-bandwidth HPC applications, whose computing demands surpass the rate of growth expected from Moore's Law
• The possibility of large-scale, high-impact outages at these massive datacenters
• The increasing importance of eco-design and the public's growing sophistication about true eco-responsibility
• The commoditization of technology, including the growth of utility computing, lower-cost storage, and open platforms
• The outsourcing of corporate computing, which is changing the job requirements and responsibilities of IT staff
• A growing linkage between game development and application development, which is shifting career paths and changing the look and feel of business applications

The Redshift Theory

Papadopoulos, chief technology officer and executive vice president of research and development, discussed the theory of computing referred to as Redshift, an application of the astronomical term to the computing universe. For years, the rate of growth described by Moore's Law was sufficient to meet the demands imposed by most applications.

However, data processing requirements from Internet applications, rich new services, and high-bandwidth HPC applications are now growing faster than what Moore's Law provides. Papadopoulos refers to them as Redshift applications, and they predominate in a wide range of markets, including pharmaceuticals, financial, energy, Web 2.0 companies, and service providers.

Companies that rely on these applications will need to design for what Papadopoulos calls "a brutal efficiency at scale." To survive the emergence of Redshift applications, companies will have to use clusters and datacenter build outs to provide the scale, while leveraging technologies such as virtualization to yield the efficiency.

Papadopoulos thinks of virtualization in a much broader way than it's considered today. "Virtualization has largely been used to abstract hardware, but it's actually more than that," he told the guests. "Think about what it would look like if virtualization were to abstract the software layer, too."

Rather than trying to compress workloads on a single system, this style of virtualization would allow workloads to move dynamically across systems. This has other implications as well, including that Redshift applications could leverage utility computing models.

Utility computing solutions, such as Network.com, are one way that companies can meet increasing requirements. Likewise, open software and platforms--such as OpenSolaris, NetBeans, open source Java technology, and more--can help businesses make the most of their technology investments.

The Coming Collapse?

Sun Vice President Subodh Bapat might have stirred the most conversation in the open discussion during dinner. As a distinguished engineer in Sun's Eco-Responsibility Office, Bapat had a lot to say about trends related to eco-friendliness (see below)

His most provocative statement of the evening, however, was the suggestion that 2008 might see the high-impact collapse of a large datacenter. Bapat compared such an event to the infamous Morris worm in 1988. The effects of such an outage would be new and unpredictable, said Bapat, and perhaps even involve national security issues.

Eco-Sophistication

On eco-responsibility, Bapat suggested that 2008 will be a year during which the notion of eco-friendliness will continue to evolve. The environmental impacts of massive, global datacenters make eco-responsibility more important than ever.

Bapat particularly decried "greenwashing," an increasing practice in which a company's commitment to eco-responsibility runs no deeper than a coat of whitewash. However, this insidious trend will likely be self-correcting as the media and public become ever more sophisticated about what constitutes true eco-friendliness.

Bapat also suggested that the corporate appetite for carbon offsets will lessen this year, due to a lack of standards and legislative uncertainty. Companies are also getting a better handle on their environmental programs, including impacts and efficiencies.

Commodity Technology

John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of Systems, underscored Papadopoulos' comments by discussing how large systems and datacenters are changing the market, and how Sun is responding.

Several factors are driving the need for ever-increasing technology resources. Some are self-evident, such as the spread of technology to under-developed parts of the world and the increasing growth of user-created content. Other factors include regulatory demands, including those in the health, financial, and security industries.

Proprietary solutions—and their high prices—are giving way to ubiquity, standards, and flexibility. Technoloy is becoming a commodity.

To date, the storage industry has not seen the degree of commoditization witnessed in other parts of the technology market. To counter this, Sun is building solutions that combine performance and innovation gains with commodity economics.

"The storage market is set for disruptions," said Fowler, "because vendors are mostly offering proprietary solutions that are more expensive than they need to be."

Sun storage solutions are integrated across the stack, from high-performance hardware on tape and disk to storage-management software to a file system called Solaris ZFS that's a glimpse of the future of storage. The Solaris ZFS file system integrates file systems and volume management to deliver proven data integrity and virtually unlimited capacity, while also offering tremendous performance improvements. Simply put, Solaris ZFS is a file system built for the era of the global datacenter.

Outsourced IT

Sun Chief Information Officer Bob Worrall discussed the effects of outsourcing, a shift that will radically change the roles, responsibilities, and career paths of IT staff. There will continue to be an enormous need for developers, administrators, and engineers of course, but the responsibilities of today's corporate IT department will evolve from managing the technology to managing the outsourcing.

"The traditional roles of application development and operations support will give way to roles such as business analysis, vendor management, contracts administration, and communications," said Worrall.

Virtual Business

Did you know Sun has a chief gaming officer ? Chris Melissinos leads Sun's collaboration with the electronic entertainment industry and drives Sun's online game server technology and other gaming-related projects.

Supporting the gaming industry is important to Sun for two reasons, according to Melissinos. Gaming platforms are flexible and powerful enough to become platforms for all types of application development. Likewise, today's game developers are likely to become tomorrow's application developers, engineers, and administrators. Looking forward and focusing on the next generation of technology has long been part of Sun's DNA.

Melissinos also suggested that business applications will become more immersive and make more use of the idea of a "virtual" space. He cited Sun's MPK20 Virtual Workplace as an early example of this trend.

MPK20 is named after Sun's Menlo Park campus, which is called MPK. It offers Sun employees a virtual 3D environment in which they can work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using natural voice communication. The project uses Sun technology, including the Project Darkstar server.

2008 is Here

Whether or not their crystal balls are entirely accurate, all of the Sun executives who spoke at the Innovation and Trends dinner expect big changes as datacenters become larger, more open, more distributed, more connected--and more important to business--in 2008.

And as always, Sun will be leading the way with our products, our solutions—and our ideas.

For more information, go to http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/executives/index.jsp