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McNealy: Don'’t dismiss us in data centers

NetworkWorld Fusion, Interview with Sun’s Scott McNealy:
On SW strategy:

WaveSet and a bunch of the other acquisitions are part of our Java Web services stack, the platform on which you write and launch executable content and Web services content through a portal. N1 is where stuff like Pirus, CenterRun and TerraSpring come in. They are all about virtualizing and provisioning CPUs, disk drives, switches and services.

On web services infratstructure:

And with Java runtimes everywhere, you can create executable content and execute that on any microprocessor operating system. It allows people who write to the Java Enterprise System to do static and nonstatic content and run it on a portfolio of microprocessor architectures and implementations without having to change one bit of their user interface.

With N1 they don’t have to change their network administration and systems management, and with Java they don’t have to rewrite their applications. Some day the customer is not even going to know [what microprocessors they’re using]. Do you know there are about 100 microprocessors in your automobile today? How many of them can you name? How many of the operating systems [on them] can you name, and does it matter to you? ….

There will always be different kinds of loads placed upon the Web services infrastructure. Some will require 64-bit; some will require 32-bit; some will require high clock rates; others will require absolute failover and retry and other kinds of availability measures. There will be all kinds of different parts of that infrastructure that will require different load optimization, and there will be no one chip or no one architecture that will provide all of the general-purpose and specific capabilities that a Web infrastructure would want to offer. So we’ll use whatever engine and just bury it into that infrastructure in a way that the customer doesn’t have to deal with it and they won’t have to rewrite their applications.

The overall vision:

So when you look at putting all of the pieces together - the edge servers, the back-end servers, the storage, the switches and load balancers, the clustering software and N1, the services and support, the applications, tuning, loading and configuration, the upgrading and remote monitoring and all the rest - we can put all that together, and we are the low-cost producer in terms of delivering a complete, assembled environment. There are a lot of folks out there that think it’s cheaper to go out and buy the piston ring, the camshaft, the carburetor and the engine block and get all of the pieces cheaper than you can buy a complete engine. But by the time you get through assembling it, it ain’t cheaper. We’ve got a pretty interesting and compelling story, unless you’re going out for the cheapest piston ring and then Dell’s got an advantage - maybe.

Source: McNealy: Don’t dismiss us in data centers