Simon’s Blog

In his blog yesterday, Jonathan Schwartz wrote:

Ask anyone who works in a datacenter - space, heat, and power are incredibly important.

Well, Jonathan is correct: space, heat and power are important. But, I think he’s incorrect that you could ask anyone who works in a datacenter this, and get the right answer. Jonathan seems to be assuming that all IT people in datacenters have the same knowledge and experience as those that work in investment banks, and organisations like Google (businesses which push the envelope in terms of use of compute power).

However, I’m not so sure they do: there are a lot of people that aren’t clued in on this stuff. Sometimes this lack of knowledge extends even to people working in very large data centers. One of my favourite examples is an organisation (which shall remain nameless) that built a truly massive datacenter: one of the largest in Europe. They crammed it full of servers, at great expense. The time came to boot them all up. Guess what happened? The fuse blew! There simply wasn’t enough power coming into the site to run the facility. I’m not sure if they ever managed to power up all the servers.

The people involved learned a valuable lesson. However, the fact remains, that this was entirely predictable. The problem was human error, due to lack of knowledge and experience. Now, let’s consider the typical people running datacenters and smaller “machine rooms” in the majority of small and large companies. The situation is even worse on the whole. Of course, there will always be exceptions - there are good people around - it’s just they’re in short supply. Do you think they ever measure power consumption in their datacenter? Do you think the people responsible for paying the electricity bills ever talk to the IT support staff? Do you think the company processes are flexible enough to re-allocate budgets in a sensible way e.g. increase the CAPEX budget, to save on short-term general company running costs? And do you think the IT support staff have good enough communication skills to influence senior management, even if they knew what the case was that they have to make? I bet that the most common answer to all these questions, as of today, is “No.”

I think Sun now has a great product line-up. In truth, they may well be better positioned than they were even when they did so well in the last bubble. However, a big part of the reason Sun did so well in the bubble, is that CIOs spent millions buying E10Ks and other high-end equipment that they simply didn’t need. I remember the Sun sales people telling me: “But your opposite numbers at companies X, Y and Z have bought them. How come you’re managing to support the running of your company with an IT CAPEX budget twenty times less?” My answer was, of course, that companies X, Y and Z didn’t need that equipment either - they’d bought the equipment because they thought they might need it in the future… and, it has to be said, because they liked the idea of having a big CAPEX budget and they could get away with it. In other words, a big part of the reason why Sun did so well in the bubble is that people were buying equipment they didn’t need.

Now, the challenge for Sun is to sell to people in small, medium and large companies everywhere, small computers that they really do need. And to do that at massive volume, and make a profit… I’m not sure they’ve really done that before…