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Sun CIO wants internal grid, ERP consolidation

20.03.2006
You might expect Bill Vass of Sun Microsystems Inc. to enjoy a lavish budget as the CIO of a major Silicon Valley technology vendor. In fact, Vass, who joined Sun in 2000 and was promoted to CIO last year, expects to spend about US$300 million on internal IT during the company's current fiscal year. That amounts to only about 2 percent of Sun's expected annual revenue. Vass spoke with Computerworld last week about IT issues inside Sun.

What's on your internal IT agenda this year? We have two big projects. For the first one, imagine a grid that delivers traditional high-performance computing that people are used to, along with stateful computing a la ERP, along with desktops being imaged out to thin-client computers, all in the same architecture.

We have more than 42,000 desktops. With desktops, most of the time you're not using your CPU cycles. So we're taking those CPUs and putting them back into the grid. We're probably the first to attempt to do this with our desktops.

For things like big table joins in a database, we move that to big [symmetrical multiprocessing] boxes. Anything that requires very high performance, we move to our Opteron [server] environment. If we set up the grid properly, we'll have a data center in the future that will always be 80 percent to 90 percent utilized, versus 10 percent to 20 percent.

Our other big project is related to our recent acquisitions. We currently are running three ERP systems: Oracle, SAP via our acquisition of StorageTek last year, and Onyx from another acquisition. My goal is to consolidate them into a single Oracle "vanilla" instance.

Did you consider going with SAP instead of Oracle? We did do a bake-off between Oracle and SAP. We chose Oracle because their business processes were very close to ours; they now own Siebel, which we also use, and they have good support for x86 Solaris. SAP has a very clean multitiered architecture and is database-independent, which we liked. But SAP was not quite as ready to go on the grid as Oracle was.