Sun CIO juggles tight budgets, IT integration
Bill Vass also talked up open-source and the company’s massive internal grid project
March 16, 2006 (Computerworld)
You might expect a leading Silicon Valley technology vendor like Sun Microsystems Inc. to spend, if not lavishly, at least more than the average company on its own internal IT.
Sun CIO Bill Vass
“For an IT company, my budget is really lean,” Vass said in an interview earlier this week. “It doesn’t compare to Oracle or Dell or IBM or HP.”
Vass expects to spend about $300 million this year on Sun’s IT needs, a figure that represents about 2% of the company’s expected revenue this year. The average company spends between 3% and 4% of its revenue, most figures show -- and most of Sun’s direct competitors spend far more.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Sun is in the midst of two ambitious multiyear IT consolidation projects that are creating major short-term costs and is integrating five companies bought last year, including Storage Technology Corp. for $4.1 billion.
“We’re building middleware connectors between StorageTek’s systems and Sun, and running it in parallel,” he said. “There won’t be a lot of savings for at least a few quarters, until we shut the StorageTek systems down.” Vass expects to do that in late 2007.
IT budgets weren’t always so tight at Sun. In the aftermath of the dot-com boom, Sun found itself with 3,000 IT employees supporting 1,200 different software applications, Vass said.
Moreover, a decentralized internal structure had left every business unit managing its own IT needs. In effect, there were 27 separate IT budgets -- each managed by the equivalent of a CIO, Vass said.
Vass joined Sun in 2000 just as that era was about change. He came from the U.S. Department of Defense, where he served as chief technology officer for the Army and later as one of three CIOs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. At the Department of Defense, he helped oversee more than $30 billion in annual IT spending.
At the Army a decade ago, Vass oversaw a rollout of Linux servers when the open-source operating system was still “considered a science project.” A self-confessed “open-source bigot,” Vass continued to bang the open-source drum at Sun while serving as chief security officer and later as president of corporate software services. But he declined to take much credit for the company’s embrace of open-source in the past two years.
Promoted to CIO last year, Vass oversees a much slimmed-down, centrally run organization. There are 800 employees, equally split between operations and application development, design and maintenance. He has also helped cut down the number of applications Sun runs to 500, although that doubled again after the StorageTek acquisition.
With last year’s buying binge, Sun found itself running three different ERP systems: its own Oracle system, StorageTek’s SAP system and a third Onyx ERP system that arrived via another acquisition.
Vass said he looked carefully at SAP before settling on Oracle. “SAP has a great technical solution that is very clean. And it is database-vendor independent, which we liked. But it was just not quite as ready to go on the grid as Oracle was.”
The grid is a massive Sun undertaking. Using the company’s own open-source N1 GridEngine software, it will combine Sun’s existing high-performance computing grid with the Oracle ERP system and 42,000 desktop PCs into a single super grid. Resources, applications and computing power will be delivered in service form via a policy engine Sun is building in-house to distribute all of these workloads, Vass said.
Jobs such as Web servers, portals and lightweight databases can be directed to Solaris 10 servers sporting processors such as Sun’s UltraSparc T1, while bigger jobs, such as “big table joins in a database,” will be sent to Opteron-based hardware boasting symmetrical multiprocessing capabilities.
The project, which began in late 2004, is set for completion in early 2008 and will be the first to bring desktop PCs into the grid, Vass said. By that time, he hopes his data centers will be utilized 80% to 90% most of the time, compared with the usual 10% to 20%.