Sun Microsystems has returned to its senses and re-committed to having data centers.

Brian Cinque, a Sun internal IT leader, made a name for himself last month by declaring that his company would cut its data centers in half by 2013 and then do away with internal IT systems altogether – like magic – by 2015. Would Sun buy compute and storage power from itself in 2015 via a utility model or turn to a true utility company? No one knew. Cinque did not say.

Now Sun is characterizing Cinque’s blog posts as a vague slip of the tongue.

The employee was simply "envisioning a world with no data centers", according to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, speaking to reporters here at Sun’s Menlo Park headquarters. (In actual fact, Cinque wrote, "Sun IT is driving towards a consolidated and unified data center approach by 2015, while reducing overall operating costs, overall energy consumptions, and to eliminate all SunIT data center's [sic]." Envisioning? Okay.)

Cinque has since been cautioned on declaring company-wide strategy via his blog.

"We will have data centers at Sun for a long time into the future," Schwartz said.

Sun boasts 4,000 employee bloggers and is willing to deal with the occasional gaffe in favor of championing free-thinking and expression. "Our job to cultivate (our employees)," Schwartz said. ®

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