This is/was a short note on design options available when creating multi-tenancy solutions for Sybase hosted applications. It looks at server sprawl, multi-database and multi server patterns. It examines Sybase workspaces and Solaris name space partitioning tools. When designing system platforms for Sybase based applications, three patterns are available. …
Blogs, Ally or Adversary
There is a bit of storm about blogging going on at the moment. Tim Bray started it here, with a sharp manifesto for its goodness, but you may have missed Claire Giordano’s contribution, which apart from making the business argument, lists a bunch of links from both the blogosphere and more traditional media outlets and usefully checkpoints the debate. In summary, businesses that want to tell the truth, benefit from authentic knowledgeable spokespeople. …
Is that a disk in your lap, or are you just pleased….
One of the trends, more obvious during the earlier part of my week in San Francisco (Feb 21st through 1st March) is the debate about nomadic vs. network computing. The key difference is the network connection. Nomads disconnect from the network, like I’ve had to do from time to time. …
Will CPU trading enable an FX market??
I met with Roger Day, Sun’s Engineering Director responsible for building Sun’s Utility Grid. We had a long conversation. I was eager to explore how one makes the outputs of the grid homogeneous, since the homogeneity of commodity is one of its axiomatic qualities. He asked me what I thought of the idea of an exchange. I replied that my view is that if we can create a primary market, and it looks like we can, a secondary market will follow. I wonder though if people will look to exchange Solaris CPU/hours for AIX or even Windows CPU/hours. Will we have a cycle FX market?. …
10 around town
Sun commissioned a competition amongst the students at the Royal Institute of Art to associate, using sculpture, key values to the No 10, and hence Solaris to celebrate the launch of Solaris 10. The winners are available for viewing outside the Lloyd’s building on Thursday. I may try and get down to St Helen’s Piazza, these look quite good. The reason I like this marketing project, is it mixes publicising the great qualities of Solaris 10, with communitarian sponsorship and we get the double whammy of people talking about the art and talking about Sun & Solaris. Also, I like sculpture. …
McNealy and Best Blog
The previous meeting was so good, I almost missed Scott’s presentation, as I entered the Hall I bumped into Ken Pepple who said that I’d missed a presentation to me and I’d won an award. I thought he was winding me up so I told him to go away. “Yeah, Yeah – pull the other one its got bells”, so Ken decided to ignore me. So we listened to Scott, present to us, and again I offer you some belated highlights. …
Service Management Facility
Popped in to see Liane Praza present on the Solaris 10 Service Management Facility. Its awesome, I really must get going on the Laptop Diaries and build a Sybase service. Steve Hahn was also present so the three of us had a chat about SMF and N1, what it enables, and how/who to convince. I mentioned the work I did with Sun Cluster at what was then ING Barings, and the application/data services boundary clash in the hope that the insights might inform the engineering of services/cluster integration. …
Searching the Net
I dropped in see Tom Clark at the Sun Library stand, who was demonstrating “Grokker” (released by Groxis (nice favicon)), a search visualisation package that the library staff have put in front of some of their collections. He ran a couple of queries which just showed how lazy “page rank” has made us. Grokker presents its findings in a series of concentric circles. We discussed the fact that colour and size should be significant, otherwise, its pretty much an explorer hierarchy using encapsulated circles, rather than the expanding/contracting explorer. Its quite dramatic. … …
Sun’s Products and Solutions
Today’s gone very quickly, but this morning my highlights were John Fowler and Mark Canepa. As previously their slides are at the Sun Analyst Summit site. These guys were preceded by John Lociano, (VP Software) who has recently visited the UK, he introduced us to his CTO, Juan Carlo Soto. Juan Carlo went through a couple of things but his emphasis on the Predictive Self Healing features of Solaris 10 was interesting but it’s hard to sell and understand features (such as availability) that customers take for granted. …
Sun’s new utility
Robert Youngjohns, spoke arguing that Applications will conform to the Utility platform (Solaris or J2EE), Is this true? Robert uses his own personal solution to his electricity problem after moving to the US where he had to get rid of his lovely solid UK plugs for the nasty dangerous easy to fallout US plugs, with one exception. Robert reckons there’ll be exceptions in IT as well, although his domestic example is a legacy appliance. My concern is the new applications that deliver compelling competitive advantage and are written in house. …