Saturday, July 15, 2006

Stare at the Sun...

and your jaw will drop. Jonathan Schwartz reviews a new product from Sun called 'Thumper' that virtually embodies the sustainability movement. Basically just a 'General Purpose System' packed to the gills with hard drives, Sun is:

...still figuring out what to call the product, "open source storage" or "a data server," but by running a general purpose OS on a general purpose server platform, packed to the gills with storage capacity, you can actually run databases, video pumps or business intelligence apps directly on the device itself, and get absolutely stunning performance. Without custom hardware (ZFS puts into software what was historically done with specialized hardware). All for around $2.50/gigabyte - with all software included.


The key is that a lot of the customized components have been replaced with customized software to interact with the generic box. That idea is revolutionary, because now hardware suppliers can just build one thing and get it right - remove all the toxins, use recyclable components, etc. and software can control it. Furthermore, Thumper just eliminates huge amounts of infrastructure because you can run an entire Enterprise System on a single box. Not only that I can't tell how excited I'm getting over this thing, I'm in awe.

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