25
January
2006
|
18:57 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Statisticians are needed to keep massive grid systems running, says Sun Services CTO

By Tom Foremski, for Silicon Valley Watcher

The killer skills for this next decade are going to be statistical analysis combined with business studies. I was just recently discussing this with my 18 year old son Matt, who is switching his second year college courses towards those subjects.


That's because in an online world where you have tens of thousands of business transactions and interactions happening in a day, or even in a minute, you need the tools to manage and interpret the behavior of large numbers of events.


Then three days later BusinessWeek comes out with its cover story: Why Math Will Rock Your World. I should remember to wear my tin foil lined hat more often--BusinessWeek is known for monitoring my brain waves :-)

At least Matt and I are thinking along the right lines. And while "Quants" as the top math stats geeks are known, are usually found in the financial sector where they are paid rock-star salaries, there is growing demand for Quants in helping to manage ever larger IT data centers.


I recently met with Daniel Berg Distinguished Engineer VP & CTO of Sun Services group, and he was telling me how Sun Services is using Quants to proactively prepare against IT failure.


As IT data centers grow ever larger, with tens of thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of servers, plus storage systems, plus network gear, plus a myriad of applications interacting with middleware and operating systems, things get complex very quickly.


And it's important to be able to analyze and monitor the huge masses of telemetry data generated by such interactions, so that patterns can be found that will signal future problems. Mr Berg says such patterns can signal IT downtime several days in advance, by which time proactive measures could be taken--but some customers don't...


Here is more of my interview with Mr Berg on ZDNet:Sun Services CTO says utility computing acceptance is slow going.