What I wrote the other week goes to prove that old adage “its easier to write a long article than it is a short one”, but I have just a few follow-ups, having slept on it for a few days. Sun’s stall as eco-friendly Americans seems quite brave given the trans-oceanic debates on responsible environmental macro-economic behaviour that took place towards the end of the week. It should go down well and I know that Sun UK is talking to its customer contacts about the brand value to them of “Green” behaviour in the data centre.

Slowly, my customers have been moving from pure economics to green. It is clear to me that Data Centre managers are moving from IT economics as their sole drivers (Investment, Benefits and IRR%) to include the environmentals (Kwatts/M2, Cooling and Space) as constraints and viewing both the average and marginal cost of the environmentals as key factors in their own right.

One of the problems that vendor tools  need to answer though is the Mandy Rice Davies answer. Having alleged, in the 1950s, that the UK Minister of Defence had been sleeping with a soviet spy’s girlfriend, she is confronted by a journalist who states “Mr Profumo says your lying”, Mandy replies “Well he would, wouldn’t he”. Sun’s simulation tool state that Sun’s hardware is better and cheaper than IBMs, – “Well we would, wouldn’t we!”. The only way to assuage people’s suspicion is to show the cynics the facts, the reasoning, the analysis and the conclusions. I know that people want to and will examine the facts, and such tools need to expose their assumptions and reasoning. (It’s always made me curious though why Sun and not IBM (or Gartner) have to answer to Mandy’s legacy.)

On a different subject, part of IBM’s spoiling tactics was to say that the T1 is not a general purpose CPU, Sun’s rejoinder “It’s not, it runs one application really well though …… its called the Internet”.

ooOOOoo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished with minor changes here in Feb 2016.

 

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