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Q & A from Sun's Worldwide Education and Research Conference
3/12/2008
But we can't do it alone, and so, the cooperation between these great libraries of the world and Sun Microsystems actually resulted in the fact that the very first users of Sun's new Honeycomb technology were libraries. So, while people think about disk as one thing, Sun has [brought together] incredible technology that can: [1] Take care of large data sets (which is a key piece of the PASIG -- how do we share this mass of data, or datasets in terms of the research data). [2] And handle the second piece, video content, which has a whole different set of characteristics. We've got a set of products around that. [3] And take care of the third piece, which has to do with just the good ol' boring digital books and all that other stuff that we automatically think of in terms of libraries -- we've got another product for that.
That's why we announced the open sourcing yesterday in John Fowler's presentation of the Honeycomb technology. Many people think initially that it's [just] storage, and that storage is hardware, but really, the Honeycomb innovation is the software glue that brought all these pieces together. That's what we're trying to drive, and I was so pleased when we had over a hundred universities and government libraries show up in Paris back in November for the real inaugural event of the PASIG group.
Scott McNealy: Thirty-seven percent of the world's data resides on the Sun platform, so we feel an enormous responsibility to lead the community around this [PASIG] effort. It really struck home when we had an executive advisory council with a bunch of CEO-types from the industrialized companies -- not the new age Web companies -- and we got onto this conversation about storage, archiving, and all the rest of it, and one of the customers described their archives as a "landfill." And trying to find an e-mail in the landfill becomes not about archiving -- it's all about retrieval. So we got onto this topic with these CEOs, and they blew up the agenda. Finally I said, "We've got to get back onto the agenda," and they said, "You've got to have an executive advisory council meeting strictly on data" -- the whole data capture, storage, retrieval, archiving, management, and protection environment. Because the number one nightmare for all companies is not that the application might go down or they might miss a customer or two because they can't log in or whatever, or that somebody might go in and corrupt some data... Their massive nightmare is a data breach, the loss of archives. I remember when we bought Storage Tek, people said, "Archives, tape -- how boring." And I said, "You want to see excitement? Go in and tell the CEO or the CIO that you've lost their archives. Then you'll see excitement." You'll have to peel that guy off the ceiling! So, it's a very, very hot topic. You couldn't have gotten a lot of energy around this twenty years ago, but you can get an enormous amount of energy and passion around it now.
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