Velocity: John Fowler (Sun), Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure

John is responsible for hardware @Sun.

Web is built on a new software stack (varnish, rails, memcache, hadoop, etc.)

Trends:

1. 16 cores per socket for 2009, Sun, AMD and Intel on the same track. Clock rates will remain the same.
2. Application memory capacity increasing, working to get 1TB of RAM at commodity prices
3. ZFS and SSD, enterprise SSD, $0.08 per iops to compare to $2.43 per ios for HDD

[Sun is clearly attacking the storage market by pushing for commoditization of software, as opposed to proprietary systems such as 3PAR, EMC, etc.] Sun is building something like x4500, using an x4450 with 1 32GB ZIL SSD, 1 80GB SSD ad 5 slow SATA drives, same capex, 3 times the throughput.