More about the Green Data Centre

What I wrote the other week goes to prove that old adage “its easier to write a long article than it is a short one”, but I have just a few follow-ups, having slept on it for a few days. Sun’s stall as eco-friendly Americans seems quite brave given the trans-oceanic debates on responsible environmental macro-economic behaviour that took place towards the end of the week. It should go down well and I know that Sun UK is talking to its customer contacts about the brand value to them of “Green” behaviour in the data centre. …

Throughput Computing

In February 2016, I undertook an exercise to copy as many as made sense, of my original blog articles across from the oracle site to my/this wordpress blog. This article represents the highlights of the original record of my day.  The Oracle blog has now gone, as have the all the pointers to Sun resources, including the presentations. I rescued and rehosted Andy Ingram’s, Workload based Systems Design 2005 which I have rescued and reposted because it was important then and remains so today, well maybe, maybe not in 2019.

Sun finally launched it’s chip multi-threading systems, promising a revolution in throughput and cheaper MIPS/Watt. This was done at a synchronous event in New York & London with a webcast for those who couldn’t make it in person.  Jonathan Schwarz travelled to London to speak to his European customers, as did  I. I recorded this on my sun oracle blog in several articles.  …

Upgrading the Qube

Three days ago, I finally received another Qube with two shiny new disks and found that at home my 5 year old PC has an ethernet controller old enough to permit the recovery disk to boot. This part of the process is really neat and hard to get wrong. (I have initialised the Qube from the OS recovery disk. This involves booting another computer using the recovery disk which is a Linux disk. This system acts as a boot server and I configured the Qube to boot from the net.) I have just finished running the upgrade process for the Qube. Given the OS was published in 2001, there are 73 upgrades and order is significant. …

More soon to be ex-colleagues

Dave Jones ,one of Sun’s Client Solutions CTOs and occasional blogger, was over last week and we hooked up and went to a works party. It was thrown by a bunch of the volunteers for our UK redundancy programme which you may have read about in “The Register”, here… . It was surprisingly enjoyable. The company i.e. at the party just shows that sometimes management lose track of what they’re trying to do  …

Dominic Kay

On the Sun/oracle blog, a couple of days ago, I noted my friend & colleague Dominc Kay’s first blog article. Today, on the same site, he wrote a very generous reference and associated me with some of the most powerful intellects working at Sun. Thanks Dom. …

10 around town

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. …