Robert Youngjohns, spoke arguing that Applications will conform to the Utility platform (Solaris or J2EE), Is this true? Robert uses his own personal solution to his electricity problem after moving to the US where he had to get rid of his lovely solid UK plugs for the nasty dangerous easy to fallout US plugs, with one exception. Robert reckons there’ll be exceptions in IT as well, although his domestic example is a legacy appliance. My concern is the new applications that deliver compelling competitive advantage and are written in house. If Electricity is an appropriate metaphor for IT, then the appliance is an application. Competitive advantage yielding applications cost more than a kettle and often cost more than the in-house infrastructure. Greg Papadopolous say’s this is going away as corporate software aquisition moves from buy/build to assemble/rent. The inherent & potential innovation available in software and its rapid time to market mean that businesses will seek to compete more using software functionality not less.

Robert also interestingly stated that in building/designing our grid we’ve discovered two very important cost saving policies. Run diskless, don’t provision the box, don’t cool the disks. Secondly, don’t remove broken systems until your retiring the rack, its too expensive to remove. We’re talking about very large grid configurations, but the first rule can be applied by most people today, provided their LAN speed is high enough.

ooOOOoo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, re-published in Feb 2016

Sun’s new utility
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