The Online Build-Your-Own-Business Mall

A Systems Architect Looks at Design Patterns for a Virtual Economy

Story by Al Riske. Photography by Howard Friedenberg.

4.May.06--James Baty is used to thinking big. He has, after all, designed the technical architectures for some of Sun's biggest customers, including global telecommunications and financial services companies.

Today, he's thinking Sun could become "the Standard Oil Trust of new business creation."

How? With an architecture and infrastructure that serves up everything you'd need to start a company. Call it the online build-your-own-business mall.

As Baty sees it, the mall would include anchor stores providing all the basics such as financial clearing, shopping mechanisms, sales-force automation, and HR services, as well as boutique shops offering very specialized business functionality.

"You could stand up a new business overnight," says the Distinguished Engineer.

An 11-year Sun veteran, Baty is renown for designing network infrastructure and e-commerce systems from the start of the Internet revolution, and he foresees a new revolution just around the corner.

Long before he became a Sun employee, Baty was a Sun customer, scooping up Sun workstations for MCC back in 1985.

"Sun used workstations to design workstations for people who would buy workstations. It was this self-reflective thing that made us our own customer, and ideally placed us -- our designs, our culture -- as an end user. I was on outsider at the time, but I felt like I was an insider," he says now.

About the time Baty officially joined Sun, the company was transitioning into enterprise computing. But many were skeptical that UNIX servers could replace mainframes. They were workgroup servers, not the things you ran a bank on.

"But of course today they are," he says. "That required a transformation, and one of the most effective elements of that transformation was Scott McNealy's idea of running Sun on Sun. We became a company using UNIX systems to run our company to sell UNIX systems to other people to run their companies."

Now comes the third phase of Sun's evolution, but it's a little harder to define, Baty says.

"We designed workstations that were holistic systems. We designed servers that were holistic systems. But now we're about designing systems that are holistic systems."

The challenge, Baty says, is breaking free of old mental models that prevent us, and our customers, from taking full advantage a technological transformation that's already underway.

"A computing grid pools resources so they can be used virtually, but most people still think in terms of servers, storage, applications, operating systems, and so on. Now we're creating devices -- and we're not the only ones -- that don't fit neatly in those categories," he says.

Take Honeycomb, for example.

"We take very large numbers of moderately sized disk drives, put them into chassis arrays, couple them with processor power and software, and enable the storage to use metadata deployed into the storage device to respond to object retrieval queries by processing the data to determine what should be delivered. Normally that job is handled by a computer. So what do I call this thing? Is it servage? Maybe it's a storver."

Or consider the UltraSPARC T2 processor with CoolThreads technology.

"Given the number of cores and threads we're putting into this, is it processor? It seems like more than a dozen servers," Baty says. "So maybe I should call it a chipver."

Then there's the Solaris operating system.

With domains and containers, it has the ability to make a single device look like many devices, Baty points out.

"I would submit to you that I do not think we have, as a company, fully attenuated the industry and our customer base to that technology transformation of virtual servers on a single system," he says. "People have been doing this since the 1970s with mainframes, but I don't think they really take advantage of it, and I don't think we really project it as a value proposition as much as we should."

And before long there will be our next-generation microprocessor, code-named Rock.

"The chip is so dense in processing ability, you'll have to create a dozen virtual servers inside there, because you don't have a single application that uses all that horsepower," Baty says. "So now you have a grid inside a chip."

The situation reminds Baty of early 1990s, when many old-line companies where slow to see the advantages of doing business online.

"Much as the Internet provided a radical transformation of business in the dot-com era, I think we're positioned for another of those transformations," he says.

"Go back just a few years and you have a classic three-tiered Internet architecture -- web servers, app servers, databases -- and those are separated by physical switches to provide network capabilities but also security and isolation between the layers. Well, there are always problems with three-tiered models. You have a management network and it has to touch all three tiers. You have directory services for authentication/authorization that might have to touch all three tiers. So how do you do that? You start punching holes through the tiers," he says.

"Then along come VLANs and you're able to create virtual networks that replace the hard physical layers between these tiers, and now you've created an architecture that is effectively not three tiers but three zones. The zones are, for the most part, distinct, although there are services that might appear in two or three of the zones. You're able to use those zones to provide the same level of security that you did with the physical switches between the layers, but if you think that they're a hard, three-tiered architecture, you have two types of errors that you're committing."

One, instead of partitioning with wires, you're partitioning with programming of the routing tables and switch, and if you're not fully aware of that, you might not be providing the level of security you want. "More importantly, you're hampered because you're not taking advantage of the new capabilities enabled by the dynamic flexibility of the architecture," Baty says.

"Architecture used to be a thing you designed. It was static. You built it, you finished it, and then you went into maintenance mode. Today I believe architecture is an emergent property to be governed by certain constraints and quality-of-service goals. Architecture becomes a continuous organic thing."

What all of this is driving toward is the grid. But what is the grid?

"Many projects at Sun take the name of grid -- there's the public grid, the commercial grid, the high-performance computing grid, the web services grid -- and all represent moves toward understanding the systemness of large interconnected devices, which we had grown to anyway. It was always a key element of Sun. The Network Is The Computer."

Baty believes the grid should be an ecosystem of storvers, servage, chipvers, containers, zones, and other dynamic innovations that enable people to easily create businesses and provide services.

To him, the Sun Grid is about much more than selling compute power and storage capacity as a utility. It's about creating a virtual economy.

"There are 1.5 billion cell phones running Java, maybe 725 million sold this year. This is the internet," Baty says, holding up his Treo smart phone.

"Now, there are about 6 billion people on the planet, around 20 percent connected to the Internet in some way. Some very casually, some of us constantly. I don't think you'll sell a computer to every single person in the world. You probably don't need one before you're, oh, 18 months old. But in Japan now the population of cell phones exceeds the population of the country. People have more than one, and things will have them -- cell phones built into vending machines to be able to order product on demand. You could easily see doubling the transaction volume or the connection volume of the Internet. Think of every server we've ever sold and selling then-again that many in 12 months."