Sun’s blackbox – That’s neat innovation!!

Yesterday over dinner & beer, one of my close friends who works for Sun Microsystem told me about Niagara processors and then he digressed to Sun’s BlackBox System (or now nicknamed Sun MD). Since he had got my attention, I ended up spending sometime reading on the Blackbox. Wow, now that’s a neat innovation. Note, it is not a technical innovation where people brag about 10% more CPU cycles. This is end-user innovation. People need datacenters, which can be deployed in a very short period, can be placed anywhere, can be easily scaled on demand, and saves money (primarily by saving power). All the components for BlackBox datacenter were available for so long but it required vision and risking a lot of money on intuition. Sun ran through the risk and the results are spectacular!! Lately, as computing is moving towards internet and enterprise computing, the need for such datacenter would grow substantially especially the cheap ones. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Facebook, etc. are just some of big names. But the real masses will also be involved because I can just take one of the Blackbox and place it anywhere in the world without the need to create a building around it. Just imagine, Cell phone, Wimax, Wireless, DishTV, etc. all use cell towers. These cell towers might not be too intelligent at this point and all the intelligence resides at one focal point. With such innovation I can embed a group of cell towers with one Blackbox and my infrastructure becomes intelligent, more robust against attacks, and with a lot better routing algorithms. The possibilities are numerous. I believe, this is a thought leadership innovation and it will change if not shake the datacenter market. The datacenters will become more distributed, more independent, easy to scale up with lower barrier to entry.
Having said that Sun launched the blackbox in Mid 2007. Since, it is still datacenter and still expensive (around $1 million), it will see a typical datacenter adoption cycle. It will take some time to realize the breakeven for this product. Secondly, the major ROI will be from AMC (Annual Maintanence Contract) and probability of Sun’s more muscle power to push its Sun Server machines such as T1000 & T2000.
All said, with this innovation, I am ready to invest in “Java” (Sun’s Stock ticker is Java). The stock will see growing confidence from the investors. The only question left is how does Sun lock out its competitors (like Dell, HP, & IBM).

Good job all the nerds at Sun. We want such innovation!!