The other day I had a chance to host one of our large telco customers in Sun’s Executive Briefing Center. One of my colleagues teed up the issue of measurement and behavior in a very clear and concise manner. It reminded me of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in that when something is observed, it’s changed by the very act of observation. (Note: I know this is a gross simplification of the concept, but I think it works in any case.)

The example used was far less abstract, it had to do with a realtime fuel efficiency on a car. My colleague noted that the presence of this instrumentation changed driving behavior to gain maximum fuel economy. I thought that was very interesting and salient with respect to what we can and should do with network services.

One of the concepts we’re working at present uses a telemetry stream to show actual power usage, fan speed, cpu temperature on a system or group of systems in a data center (stay tuned, it’ll show up in our Fresh Tools tab soon…) We can use this to determine some simple maintenance activities that need to happen, like filter cleaning/replacement independent of human interaction. We can also much more accurately forecast power and HVAC requirements for data centers vs. what’s actually published in the specs. The benefits of Sun’s T1 chip and T1000/T2000 systems are huge in this space and it fits right in with our Eco Computing Initiative.

Here’s the punchline: When the customer heard we could do this, he said “We’ve got a Director and team dedicated to just these tasks. What do they do once this is deployed?” I hope they get redeployed in the customer’s business to create distinct value for the end user vs. monitoring power!

Network services like these are really going to make an impact on how our customers operate their data centers.