Sun’s Red Shift

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is saying their growth will come from a change in the nature of computing, which they are labeling “Red Shift.” The video is of Sun’s Greg Papadopoulos explaining the term and what Sun believes will happen in the market.

Link to Sun’s Video

These guys obviously are pre-occupied with scale, as is Google. Google’s approach of using millions of cheap servers to achieve scale has inherit limitations, atleast that’s what the Sun Marketing folks want you to believe.

I personally think that Sun may be onto something for a few reasons. The first is that it is much easier to run at scale efficiently when the hardware “overhead” is reduced. A growing Internet startup may find it cheaper to scale up by adding small servers. However, once a certain point is reached, it is far more efficient to run a larger server with less energy consumption and a smaller footprint for the same processing power.

Secondly, with virtualization becoming a commodity and commoditizing O/S and Platforms, it is easier to manage less hardware with more horsepower. Virtualization makes it possible to fully utilize large machines.

P.S. I am a Sun (JAVA) shareholder.