To be honest, I’m not sure why I like the big honking products, either. Maybe it’s that, in the past, I haven’t spent so much time in server farms, so the scale of some of these things is new to me? In particular, I’d never seen anything like Thumper before: you open one of them up, or at least I do, you see all those disks jammed together, and you say wow. Somehow it was a more visceral statement than I’d seen before.

Also, again for me, some of this wasn’t just about turning the dials up to eleven: more like turning the dials up to 20. Three or four years ago, when we started getting the first prototype Thumpers and StreamSwitches, I was used to having servers with tens to hundreds of gigabytes of storage, and a gig or two of memory. All of a sudden, I was working with a single server with tens of terabytes of storage (and you could hook them up to get hundreds of terabytes), and another server with a terabyte of memory. So, all of a sudden, the capacity of servers that I was working with jumped by about a factor of a thousand. We’ve all gone through that before, but I’m used to its taking a decade or so for that to happen, not for it to happen all at once. (The amount of memory and storage on my personal machines hasn’t expanded by that much in the 9 years that I’ve lived in California.) Again, that says as much about the environment that I was coming from as anything else – I assume that there were machines around with that much disk storage and memory, though I’m not sure they were quite that small – but it had an impact on me.

Admittedly, Constellation, even in its full-rack version, doesn’t have the same impact for me, and there’s no particular reason why it should for anybody else. It’s a big step towards helping us re-enter the HPC market in a serious way (which we started a year ago, but we need to keep the momentum going), and I’m sure there are corporate customers who will find it fits their needs very well, but while that’s great for Sun, it’s not like people wouldn’t have been able to build supercomputers without our products. I actually like the openness and modularity of the architecture more than I like the scale; I’ve probably been sucked in by marketing hype (I haven’t looked into the IBM and HP blade products at all closely), but I get the impression that it’s a lot easier to mix and match modules (at least I/O ones) on our blades than it is on our competitors, and that they’re going in for proprietary lockin in ways that we aren’t. I’m sure they’ll come around, but it’s nice to be in the lead in hardware openness in this instance. (If we in fact are – see the marketing hype disclaimer above.)

Your Sun boosterism never makes me stop reading. But I am utterly nonplussed by your excitement over big honking products. I mean, congrats to Sun, but from the point of view of a non-stockholder, isn’t somebody going to turn the dial to eleven? There are so many dials to turn; it’s not like Constellation’s choice of dial is particularly interesting. You’re a guy with good taste; why is this exciting?