Net falling short of potential: Sun chief

By ADAM GIFFORD

Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy thinks the internet is under-hyped.

That might be expected from a man who has become a billionaire selling the servers that so many of the dotcoms rely on to keep their websites running.

But his observation is more about the amount of data not on the internet - yet.

"Name one site you can't access with a Java browser? None. Name one website you can access through Windows? Not one.

"Is there any information that can't be put on the internet? None.

"But with a Java browser, can you get at more than 20 per cent of your company's data?" he asked at this month's Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco.

Mr McNealy said very few devices were connected to the internet. "McLaren [motor racing] gets 4 megabytes of telemetry data every lap. How much do you get from your car? Don't you want to know what the temperature is when the tyres separate?

"Wouldn't you like to know where your 16-year-old is when they borrow the car - 'What are you over there for? You said you were going to the library.'

"Some people call that big brother. I call that dad."

He finds the business of putting a computer, also known as a black box, in the tail of the plane extraordinarily foolish.

If the plane crashed, he said, investigators had to put a huge effort into finding the computer so they could work out what the plane's systems were doing in the moments before the crash.

"Let's download the telemetry to a Sun server in a bunker that can withstand a direct hit from a 747," he said.

Mr McNealy said the internet was moving into a phase requiring systems that were always on, providing access to huge amounts of data and volumes of transactions.

Sun and Oracle had been working closely together to prepare for this, and the Oracle 9i database was developed on Sun hardware.

Mr McNealy said voice-over internet protocol (VOIP) was still in its infancy, but already 70 per cent of VOIP was being done on Sun's Solaris operating system.

"That will be a good market," he said. "Motorola estimates that within five years half the voice traffic handled by telephone companies will be done over internet protocols.

"Over three-quarters of that will be on Sun."

Mr McNealy said much of Sun's research and development spending was going towards its concept of a WebTone switch.

Sun describes the WebTone as the 21st century internet equivalent of today's dialtone.

It facilitates information flow across a multitude of devices from smartcards to supercomputers.

Mr McNealy said storage was "a feature of a big freaking WebTone switch, not an industry."

That is why Sun is pushing its own storage solutions, upsetting the current web model where EMC is the dominant storage provider.

At Open World, Sun announced that its Sun StorEdge Network Data Replicator (SNDR) software had successfully completed the Oracle Storage Compatibility Program (OSCP) comprehensive remote mirroring test suite.

That means Oracle customers experiencing explosive data growth have an Oracle-compatible solution for replicating data remotely in real time in any multi-vendor storage subsystem.

SNDR is designed as a service to the storage network. It provides redundant data storage across geographically separate sites attached directly or through a SAN (Storage Area Network) to a server running Sun's Solaris operating system server.

By doing so, SNDR protects critical information in the event of a disaster and reduces recovery time after a disaster.

Sun started out as a provider of high-end workstations, but four years ago it branched into the high performance computing market, and in 1998 entered the network storage market.

Sales of its E10000 server have pushed it past IBM, Compaq and SGI to become the second leading supplier of high-performance computing systems during the first half of this year.

Research firm International Data Corporation said Sun's revenues of $US580 million gave it 20 per cent of the HPC market, just $US17 million less than leader Hewlett-Packard.