1angel: Solaris Technical Marketing

People frequently ask me what do they need to do in order to learn a new operating system, and the usual answer is practice, keyboard time with your system.... unfortunately that means trial and error, or expensive books or if you are lucky, spending time with a friend who alredy knows how to use it.

In my mind, that was the wrong approach, so a few years ago with some of my colleagues I came up with what we call the "Learning Centers", a place where we can spark your knowledge and understanding of our Operating System.

In the Learning Centers you can find demos, reference material, support offers and my personal favorites, "How to guides", these HTG are small step by step examples that guide you through the configuration of some of our most complex technologies. 

Why? because you don't need to read a 200 pages manual if you don't want to, you just need a few well thought recipes and you can figure out the rest.... nonetheless the official documents are needed for many reasons like references or deep understanding of the commands and technology.

So here are the links to the Solaris and the OpenSolaris HTGs, of course I don't write them all, that may have happened a few years ago when I wrote the first one on how to install Solaris on you laptop that you can still find here, although this is Version 3.0

Try them all and let us know what you think of them.

I am an avid music consumer, I am a gamer, and I am frustrated rock musician, so no wonder that when the original Rock Band game came out I rushed to get it for my PS3, since then I have bought a bunch of songs from oldies to cutting edge bands..... I'm hooked into it, Rock Band 2 came out, and guess what, I got it, just for the new songs, bought the upgrade to play songs from both games..... and even the new Beatles Rock Band game is right now waiting for me to get a break from work to be played.

Now I have a new problem.... pretty soon I'll have to add Frustrated Sound Engineer to my "interests".

The creators of Rock Band are creating a new business model around the popular game, now every band, every wanna-be sound engineer, labels and music aficionados can create playable content for the Rock Band games.... in the words of Harmonix: "The Rock Band Network is a revolutionary system that will allow bands, studios and record labels to create and sell playable game content from their master recordings using the same professional tools used by our developers."

You can find more information here. And maybe sometime soon, we'll see Rock bands from all over the world selling their Rock Band tracks on line..... I'm dying to play Musica Ligera from Soda Stereo, or Los Dioses Ocultos from Caifanes or many hits from Iron Maiden... or for the matter I want to play any song from my expansive collection, or any local band that you can recommend!

As in my toddler's own words!

Pure ROCK! Iron Maiden is PURE ROCK!!!

Recently I visited a customer who was very excited about OpenSolaris, he was determined to use some built-in virtualization capabilities inherent to Solaris in his everyday production system.

But there was a little problem with the overall solution, he was planning on using OpenSolaris on an IBM mainframe, and while I understand his point of view I don't agree with his assessment of the situation and solution.

His problem is that every single time that he requires a new system for a web related project he has to deal with a very slow process due to internal bureaucracy and industry regulations, so his solution was to use Containers as a rapid deployment mechanism for Solaris systems, because for a new deployment, he just needs to create a new container and that takes only a few minutes instead of days or weeks.

That, certainly is a plausible solution, nonetheless the fundamental flaw is the cost of maintenance, the cost of maintaining a mainframe will likely kill the benefits and ROI of a rapid web deployment, and you can find a nice white paper that address just that here.

The other problem is the internal process itself, regulations and other non-technology issues may delay deployments for several weeks or months!

Bottom line, when thinking of virtualization we have to answer a few questions:

1. Why do I want to virtualize?
2. Which technology works better for me? (find here some examples)
3. How am I going to control my virtualized space? (a future topic, but here is a link)
4. Does it makes business sense to virtualize?
5. Are we ready to virtualize (processes, regulations, training)?
   

Some of the answers may be obvious, but some others may not..... follow the links and explore your options.

I have the privilege to represent Sun in many speaking opportunities, mainly talking about Solaris and OpenSolaris, but in some cases because of my personal interests on many other aspects of Hi Tech and Marketing.

The audience for those events vary tremendously as you can imagine, one day I talk to a multi-billion dollar company CEO/CIO and the next day I talk to one of our many OpenSolaris User Groups, then the next day I'll talk to a group of students, just like recently I did at the ESIME Culhuacan in Mexico City and the next day I could be presenting to some of our multiple partners ISVs and OEMs.

But one of the things that I get asked a lot is how we can continue to be in touch? As you can imagine not everybody is on Facebook, LinkedIn or any of your favorite Social Networks, so I decided to open a Blog, where at least I could make my thoughts available and continue the conversation.....

So, stay tunned, I'll try to post regularly about technology, soccer, rock and many other topics that have been brought up during my presentations.

Cheers,

Angel