Sun – Page 2 – latoga labs

Since my last post about last week’s acquisition spree, I have talked to a number of people on the topic of the Sun buying MySQL. While I haven’t been running into Sun much lately in my enterprise sales forays it was largely because I have been dealing with SOA based development solutions, an area where Sun doesn’t have a strong solution (even though I had partnering conversations with them at one point to help strengthen their offering). After talking to some people who have been tracking Sun more closely lately as well a few Sun Executives and CIOs, I have seen a different picture.

Sun has been working on this acquisition for well over a year. It fills a very nice hole that they had in their solution stack…the database. No IT Executive I have talked to would seriously consider replacing their Oracle or DB2 with MySQL, but they would consider moving 100’s or even 1000’s of edge databases over to MySQL. This gives Sun a leg up in their enterprise sales and “solution” providing. It also helps to round out their Open Source solution stack (the OpenSolaris/MySQL 1-2).

Additionally, I understand that Sun will hold MySQL as a separate entity and let it run as such. With the inevitable inclusion of a few Sun Execs and Sales connections, this should help ease concerns that the web2.0 companies who run their business on MySQL were having. It still remains to be seen if some of the performance enhancements that the user community has been begging for will be addressed or not.

I just happened to surf over to the Sun website today and ran across Proejct Blackbox. a quote from the website: “Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized data center–built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.”

I didn’t spend more than 10 seconds thinking about this before I thought…that doesn’t make sense. The whole concept of a ‘portable’ data center for quick capacity addition make sense. Take a shipping container, insert a cooling system, power system (with one huge plug!), and 1U servers and presto…instant portable mini-data center.

The problem…why in the world would you paint the thing black? (I’ll get to the logos in a bit)

Let me see if I remember back to my high school physics courses….black absorbs light, white reflects it….got it. Big steel container with hot computers running inside of it. The container is designed to just be dropped off in the parking lot next to your data center…most likely in the direct sun. Let’s paint it black so it get even hotter and paint a big Sun Log on it so everyone knows what it is (psst: guys…ever wonder why most of your customer’s data centers don’t have big signs out front that says “XYZ Corp. Data Center”?)

This seems to be a great example of Marketing taking over a technology project and making bad decisions based on the need to add value (note: I have worked in marketing, and have great friends who are marketing wizards…). Let’s hope that common and business sense takes over for Sun on this project before this prototype goes into production.

Sun MySQL Acquisition Followup

Project Blackbox: Great Name, Bad Color…