Sun had a customer jamboree today, and I documented my attendance on my Sun Oracle blog in a couple of articles, covering sustainability, teleworking & productivity, James Gosling on Java and CPU architecure, design and specialisation and the nature of innovation. …
I wrote a piece about Sun’s short term future based on two pieces of optimism. The first was a third quarter of revenue growth, and a first of profitability for a while, the second was the hope that the systems market would permit competition through differentiation. I said, “At Sun’ we’ve just returned to profitability with our third quarter of revenue growth in a row and as some very famous economist said, three data points are a trend. One of the insights underpinning our strategy is that Sun innovates and monetises intellectual property. …
Jonathan announced Project Black Box at the end of last month. Its a Data Centre in a shipping container and expanded on its unique value in his blog article “A picture’s worth…. Jonathan said that customer reaction has varied with equal measures of a) nervous laughter, b) incredulity, c) profound curiosity …
I returned from Sun’s West coast training events today; my trip started last month and the original articles can be found here…. Potentially worth revisiting are my articles on system/data centre density and the dichotomy between M&E management and the management of the IT payload. I wrote a bit about managing the backstage technology but in retrospect, from reading the notes, a downbeat trip. On the flight home, for once, I left the movies alone and finished Jennifer Government by Max Barry …
On my old sun/oracle blog, I wrote a piece reporting some thoughts about whether Web 2.0 was more than a marketing slogan, and Sun’s decision to market its first storage appliance as web 2.0 server. On re-reading the original article, what comes through is my confusion about the then web 2.0 syndrome and the need and role of systems like the x4500 aka Thumper. This version of the article has been edited; some words about my experimenting with Yahoo’s 1st generation PaaS has been removed. I obviously thought this was part of the future but the reality was that (for that type of application) it fell through the gap between IaaS on which I host this blog, and SaaS, (flickr, google maps and wordpress.com), the first two of which I integrate into the blog, and the latter is a competitor technology. …
On my sun/oracle blog, I reprised my recent visit to the Sun Labs open days firstly by pointing at Ashlee Vance’s article; he had also visited the Labs at the beginning of June, and wrote up his findings more rapidly than me. The link is still live here…. The article covers some stuff I didn’t follow through on, and offers a segue into games serverplex designs. The article is headlined “Sun Labs edges toward practicality”, and suggests his interests were more short-term than mine.
I had delayed the write up and publication, I had a lot to say and these things take time. The original articles in June reflect what I thought at the time. I have since spoken to both colleagues and customers and recognise that some of my priorities were a bit awry and I may not have given some subjects sufficient attention, in particular, I didn’t visit many of the “Virtualisation” projects available and haven’t reported on those I did visit such as “Project Crossbow”, a network interface virtualisation and resource management project. …
My reason for being in Ca, is to visit the Sun Labs Open House. The day was opened by Bob Sproull, the Labs Director and Greg Papadopolous, Sun’s EVP for R&D and CTO. They both spoke about the goals and accountability of Sun Labs. They look to create new technologies, improve our current technologies or occasionally improve Sun. They are beginning to look at Sun Labs with a venturer’s view and no longer measure the output of white papers, books and conference speeches. Greg Popadopolous said, “these things are better done in Universities”. After the speeches I wandered over to the main building and …
I attended a Sun customer jamboree, called Sun LIVE 2006 and posted some blogs articles on my old sun/ora cle blog on innovation in government and the nascent mobile games industry, which I added to here. …
During a presentations on N1, Garima Thockburn & Doan Nguyen showed an architectural functional model for the applications provisioning technology. What’s really cool is that, as I’d expect from Sun, although we often forget what it made us, is that openness is being designed in from the ground level. …
Today was planned as a look at Sun’s system management solutions and the day was started by Sohrab Modi, the V/P for the group. We really have a problem with our branding, but we’re sticking with N1, managing maNy systems as 1. Sohrab’s presentation called “Simplify, Integrate, Automate”, hit two key points for me. The first is that its a solution, the second that there are two dimensions to virtualisation. …