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.

He also demonstrated the coming N1 Grid Console. John Lociano had Sybase on his slide as an ISV, (hooray), but interestingly went through the reasons why (two years ago) customers weren’t engaging with Sun. We were expensive, slow, SPARC only, loosing the application developers, had no Linux interoperability (or Microsoft) and were seen (somehow) as proprietary. Only the most biased would not agree that Sun has addressed these things. On the proprietary front, we’re sometimes not our own best friends, but Solaris is UNIX (SVR4) & UNIX is not proprietary and now we’ve open sourced Solaris. The techies at Sun should retain or reacquire the open, community vocabulary that its always had about its software, and this desire to cooperate and leverage our community is what I saw at SEC earlier this week. Actually, this one makes me spit, the only people that really think Solaris is proprietary are those with an interest in an alternative operating system. Most of them think that all UNIXs are proprietary.

John Fowler introduced Andy Bechtelstein who permitted him to lift the cloth off one of the next generation systems, an MP opteron system. John said that since his previous job was software, he’d never been able to do this before.

John Canepa did his new Solution/Problem/Product/Product/Product/Product……. presentation. Its reminiscent of the famous quote in the UK (three years ago).

“Sun is now a solutions company, we have 2 CPU solutions and 72 CPU solutions.”

There is no doubt that we have an excellent range of storage products on top of which storage architects can offer flexible, function rich and cost effective solutions architectures. We can at least have conversation with customers about their problems rather than ask them how many they want and this is only expanded by the breadth of our data management software solutions. My highlight was his first point on his solutions slide that makes the point that to convert data to information, users need running applications code and this does not run on the disk controller.

Business data architects (should) think information -> application -> server -> storage, if they get that far. Platform designers that let their storage management architects or vendors determine their applications strategy are not working to their employer’s shareholders interest. I’ve been arguing this for seven years and sometimes its seemed very lonely. He repeated the crack that money spent on storage is a waste because if the data is on the disk it ain’t working. Nice one! Another reason I like John is that he quotes my (our) book, “Migration to the Solaris OS” by Pepple, Down & Levy. Anyway Sun Blueprints has been revived and rumour has it we’re going to release two more chapters as online blueprints. 

ooOOOOo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, this has been adjusted slightly, mainly to remove broken links.

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