Sun’s plan of zero data centers by 2015 is very ambitious but achievable, instead of having their data centres down they hall they’ll be a few miles away. Sun has realized that by outsourcing their datacentre management it is cheaper than having themselves manage it. Their biggest challenges they will face is migration is their current data and practices to this new platform and developing the tools to do this. Currently the tools are not here yet to do this but they are taking a gamble that within 7 years they should be able to do this. I’m sure virtualization will be a standard by then and software as a service will be the norm. With virtual machines becoming very stable and reliable they will have eliminated the problem of having to walk into the room and reset a machine. Which other than swapping out dead hardware is probably their only physical need to have the machine in a reachable location.
There are some other interesting write ups on this at the following blogs from Nick Carr and at InsideHPC.com
