IT DRILLDOWN
 
NEWSLETTERS
 

CIO.com updates, insights and advice on technology, management and your career.

 
 
 
LEADERSHIP
 
CIO Executive Programs
The Leader in Face-to-Face Education for Senior Executives

Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »

 
CIO Executive Council
A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Public Teleconferences
Join CIO Executive Council members and participate in the following live teleconferences:

* Planning for Succession:
Models for IT Leadership Development, June 23
* Change Leadership at General Growth Properties: A
Pathways Leadership Development Seminar, June 25
* Managing Change: Centralizing Your IT Organization
July 29

More / Register »

Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »



 
 
RESOURCE CENTER
 
 
 
SUBSCRIBE TO CIO
 
Are you involved in setting the direction for your company's IT budget or strategy?

Apply today for a FREE subscription to CIO Magazine!

 
 

Q&A

 

Inside Sun's Virtual World for Internal Collaboration

When Sun Microsystems saw Second Life, it saw an opportunity for businesses to internally collaborate behind the firewall. In this Q&A with one of the main project leads, CIO.com finds out how virtual worlds fit into Sun's world, and down the road, maybe everyone else's as well.
 

PAGE 2

What makes virtual worlds more compelling for that social interaction than existing technologies, such as phone and video conference?

Up until now, Sun, like most companies, has used audio conferencing. We’ve used a little bit of video conferencing too, but a lot people working at home don’t have video because that’s their personal space. So we mostly use audio conferences. The problem with this is we’re not getting the social interaction and the informal brainstorming you’d get in person. We figured [we] can create a virtual world where you can begin to re-create that social interaction, and then we could really create a wonderful place to bounce ideas off each other, both as a group or just between two people.

The consumer virtual worlds, like Second Life, have seen pretty significant user adoption. With that comes the need to scale. When you think about Sun's virtual world and getting thousands of employees on it, how will you plan for scale?

Second Life and other online games use this process called sharding. This means pieces of the virtual world are hosted on specific servers. So servers will have their capacity, and when it fills up, it fills up. For example, if a bunch of people decide to visit an island in Second Life, and that island begins to fill up with avatars, so does the server assigned to it. Meanwhile, you have all of these other unused servers. This is a huge problem in almost all the multiplayer games.

So at Sun we decided we’d use Darkstar, our game server. It’s a scalable platform that doesn’t do sharding. Instead, the [virtual world] developers write their applications as if they’re on one giant server. Then the underpinnings of the Darkstar servers allocate resources as they're needed. If one server starts to fill up and get near capacity, it goes to another one.

When will something like this become available for large enterprises?

Right now, Project Wonderland is open source and people are free to use it. But this whole project has been more popular with people initially than we thought it might be. So we have started to work with business development to see what Sun could do for customers. Maybe we could provide hosted services, or even manage the service (and server) for them behind the firewall. There are a lot of different models to explore. But for right now, we want to get more people using it here internally.

Other stories by C.G. Lynch

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Loading...
 
 
ABCs
 

How To Do Nearly Anything

Just the basics, please. Sometimes we all need a refresher or we need to make sure our team and our colleagues are all on the same page.

Over 25 tutorials on everything from business intelligence to virtualization.

 
 
FEATURED SPONSORS
 
 
 
SPONSORED LINKS
 

Run Desktop and CRM Applications Side by Side with Salesforce & Google

User Interface as a Service - Visual Force

The Combined Power of Salesforce and Google Apps

Enhancing Online Sales and Support

Seeing is Believing: The Value of Video Collaboration

Business Mobility And The Agile Organization

Demonstrating the Business Value of Mobile Device Management

Extending PCI Compliance to the Mobile Workforce

White Paper: IDC Analysts Discuss Open Text

Business Transaction Management: The Evolution of IT Management

LIVE Webcast - The Mainframe is Dead...Long Live the Mainframe?

Oracle 9i Database Upgrade Management Services - Upgrade with Confidence

How to Support Your IT Environment - Important Factors

HP Puts Its Disaster-tolerant Capabilities to the Test

Microsoft System Center - Designed For Big

Choose a mobile device platform with familiar programs and simplified management

Improve device management - Microsoft® System Center Mobile Device Manager

Explore the interactive whitepaper: Rightsizing Blades for the mid-market

Easily integrate the Mac in your Enterprise

Reducing Data Center Costs with Data Deduplication: A TCO Analysis

Telwares helps firms validate, manage and optimize their telecom spend

TDWI Research report clears confusion about automating data governance

Taking Document Automation to the Next Level

Webcast: Transformation of Application Development

Webcast: Building an Optimized Infrastructure

Create and Run Any Application On-Demand

A New Generation of Software as-a-Service (SaaS) Solutions

Implementing Knowledge Management

Telepresence for the Enterprise: Key Verticals and Lines of Business

High-Definition: The Evolution of Video Conferencing

Managing Mobility: An IT Perspective

BPM Done Right: 15 Ways to Succeed Where Others have Failed

Tuning ERP and the Supply Chain for Profitable Growth

White Paper: Transportation is a prime opportunity to reduce costs

Webcast: Learn how Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft are helping organizations overcome productivity declines

Putting Windows Server and Citrix to Work in the Enterprise

Uniting IT with Business through ITSM

Extending the Enterprise Network Through Mobility

Cost-Effective Data Center 1U Server Solutions

Automate Business Processes - Try a Free Mashup Composer

Read Forrester's advice for deploying an enterprise mobile solution

Do the math-calculate the impact of mobile device deployment on your bottom line

Easily manage the Mac in your Enterprise

GET YOUR VoIP ONTM! Win 2 Years of Hosted VoIP from Cypress. $100,000 retail value. Enter today!

Build up or Tear down? See how UC makes sense with Nortel. Calculate your UC ROI

Speed, agility, flexibility - The HP BladeSystem c-Class

See why 93 of the Fortune Global 100 depend on Blue Coat.

White Paper: How Visualization Can Fix Business Software Problems

Oxford International Modernizes Vehicle Order Management System

Learn about the Three Pillars of Data Protection