Sun

A Geek In Training

Posted Tue, 09/08/2009 - 05:55 by geekism

The Sun Will Always Shine

I'm sure I will bore most of you with my historical ramblings, but today signifies a big change in my life. It is bitter sweet. I'm leaving the company that I have literally spent almost half of my life with. Sun Microsystems hired me right after I graduated college in 1989. My first day at Sun happened to fall on my 21st birthday. I was hired to do component level debug for deskside servers in their Milpitas manufacturing plant. It was a whole new world for me. I had moved from a modest town in Colorado to Phoenix, Arizona to attend a trade school for electronics. As I neared graduation, I interviewed with IBM, HP, Sun and others. The Sun interview clicked and before I knew it, I was on my way to the center of innovation - The Silicon Valley - to start working for one of "the" high flying tech companies. Ironically, I knew zilch about either of them. I was as green as you could get. I had no idea what Sun built, who they sold to, or how they got there. I had never touched Unix and didn't know the difference between a compute server and the server at Denny's.

Online Chatter

Posted Wed, 08/26/2009 - 20:31 by geekism

Today I decided to move my blog from sun.com to Data Center Pulse. I have been a blogger for about two years now. My blogging has been sporadic due to the hectic schedule that most of us Silicon Valley types have to lead. But, my intent was to provide my perspective on technology, the data center world and of course what I was working on. At Sun, I was having a blast with the mountain of projects we were juggling and the great innovations that were coming from it. As you have seen in my different blog entries and the content we have shared, Sun is a very transparent company. Sun encourages the sharing of knowledge to advance technology. It is part of the culture and something I respect very much. It was just that perspective that made me start Data Center Pulse. I attended a leadership connections conference in Sept/08 and was inspired by Jonathan Schwartz's open source vision. It resonated. It made perfect sense to me. I wanted to apply this mentality to my industry - data center infrastructure. The very next day, DCP was born. It has grown very quickly and many important focus areas have emerged. I have received great support from everyone at Sun to keep true to the original intent of DCP -- Influence the data center industry through end users - aka, the data center customers.

CSIA CleanTech Innovation Award

Posted Fri, 06/12/2009 - 16:36 by geekism

And the winner is...

Today I was forwarded an email about Sun winning and Apex award from the Colorado Technology Association (CSIA) for our Broomfield, Colorado Datacenter project. I love it when you win an award you didn't even know you were in the running for. :-) Sun is a founding corporate sponsor of the CSIA organization (through StorageTek). Kristin Russell, the Sun IT Operations VP, is currently on the board of directors. We recently hosted an Eco Innovation Summit at our Broomfield Campus which I had the privilege to speak at along with Dr. Carl Koval, Faculty Director, Colorado University Energy Initiative and Robert Noun, Executive Director, Communications and External Affairs, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Innovation Matters, What's Cool in Datacenters

Posted Sun, 05/03/2009 - 22:56 by geekism

Late last year I had a fun conversation on Greg Papadopolous show, Innovation Matters. This show was targeted for Sun Internal, but there was quite a bit of interest to share it externally. So on February 14th, it was shared on channelsun.com. We are very transparent when it comes to the work we do, and we want our customers to benefit from it. So enjoy the segment Greg titled, What's Cool in Datacenters.

Bring Out Your Dead!

Posted Fri, 04/24/2009 - 11:48 by geekism

Late last year we instituted a project titled Bring Out Your Dead (inspired by the Monte Python's Holy Grail Film). It was an effort to hunt down and remove orphaned and unused hardware at the company. The challenge I gave to Serena Devito on my staff was to do this as a low-cost, no-cost effort. We weren't out to spend millions on replacing equipment, we just wanted to find comatose devices and get rid of them. We knew that even with all our datacenter consolidation efforts over the last two years, there was still a lot of waste going on. The reorganizations, acquisitions, reductions in force and other business activities left quite a bit of equipment in limbo. So, we partnered with our lab and datacenter managers to get rid of them. What we found surpassed even our expectations. We pulled 440+ pallets of equipment from four of our major campuses in just three months. 6,199 devices in all with 4,100 of them being servers! The icing on the cake was that 64% of the equipment we pulled was still powered on! It was just sitting there burning energy. The picture below shows 50% of the equipment that was removed. It filled one of our warehouses in Hayward, CA!

Wild West Data Center

Posted Wed, 04/22/2009 - 06:29 by geekism

On January 26, 2009 we had a grand opening for Sun's Broomfield, Colorado Datacenter. It has a been a long project to consolidate 496,000 square feet from our Louisiville, Colorado campus (former StorageTek site) into 126,000 square feet across five floors in our largest building Broomfield.

The Chill Off Is Ready To Go!

Posted Fri, 04/10/2009 - 19:14 by geekism

The Chill Off testing will begin in two weeks. In this Data Center Pulse episode, Brian Day and Mike Ryan step us through the test bed where the chill of tests will be conducted. A lot of companies have donated their design expertise, parts and labor to get this ready. This includes Sun Microsystems (test location, infrastructure, test equipment), Redwood City Electric (electrical design and installation), SynapSense (Meters, Sensors and other controls), Western Allied (Mechanical design, parts and labor), California Hydronics Corporation (Water Control Pump), Norman S Wright Mechanical Equipment Corporation (Variable Frequency Drive), F Rodgers Insulation & Specialtiy Contractors (Chilled Water Pipe Insulation), and Liebert Corporation (Refrigerant Pumping System - XDP).

Construction Continues

Posted Wed, 04/01/2009 - 14:21 by brian.day

Construction continued this week on the Chill Off test area on Sun Microsystem’s Santa Clara, CA campus. Chilled water piping and electrical conduit is going in now. Carsten Dietze from Knuerr will be on site next week to assist as we begin hooking up the Knuerr Cool Therm solution!

I am still negotiating test slots with a few of the vendors (everybody wants a vacation in summer =) and expect to nail that down this week or next.

Brian

The Internet IN A BOX!

Posted Thu, 03/26/2009 - 19:07 by geekism

The entire internet in one box. Sound unbelievable? Not so. Today, Sun launched a single Sun Modular Datacenter (SunMD), housed in our Santa Clara datacenter, that contains the Wayback Machine from Internet Archive. IA has captured the web in the form of pages, graphics, videos, java scripts and more for the past 12 years! Yes, the past twelve years. Just imagine, all that "creative" stuff you posted on the web through your career (and yes you know those pictures and videos I'm talking about) have been captured by the Internet Archive crawlers. I even checked one of the sites I had created in 1996 for a non profit called Child Quest International, Inc. It was just as I had built it (boy my graphics were archaic then).

DCP Takes on the Chill Off 2

Posted Thu, 01/01/2009 - 07:10 by DCP

In June 2007, Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) held a Data Center Energy Summit at Sun Microsystems Santa Clara, CA Campus. This summit showcased 13 demonstration projects from participants all over the Sliicon Valley. One of the most intriguing projects was the Chill Off. An effort to compare cooling technologies side by side to see how efficient they were. The results were presented by Dean Nelson from Sun Microsystems and Tim Xu from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL) along with a panel of the participating companies. A summary of this event was captured in Dean Nelson’s blog.

In October 2008, Sun Microsystems signed up for the Chill Off 2 to expand the testing that was done in 2007. Not only would the testing increase the rack densities from 11kW to 30kW, it added five more layers that addressed many of the areas that Data Center owners and operators were challenged with. Coordination quickly began to line up the multi-layered DC test stack.

On Friday November 14, 2009, Data Center Pulse became an official sponsor of the Chill Off 2 because of the independent, unbiased effort that the it represents. Data Center Pulse members are leading the 2008/2009 efforts including program management, test coordination, hosting and reporting. All Chill Off updates will be reported through the datacenterpulse.org website.

A video summary podcast has been created to introduce the industry to the effort. it is also posted on the Datan Ceter Pulse YouTube channel. A blog detailing the weekly activities will be posted on datacenterpulse.org soon.

RESOURCES

The Sun Will Always Shine