President and COO of Sun Federal Bill Vass' Weblog

Thursday Apr 17, 2008

Facts that Every IT Professional Should Know About Sun

The Information Technology environment is a complicated place with many messages about the future; and what CIOs, CTOs and business leaders should be investing in. As enterprises scale out to meet the demands of their mission, business, customers and employees; the need for open end-to-end IT solutions becomes more important every day to IT executives and business leaders.

People often ask me questions like "is Sun a hardware company or a software company?" or "Sun does too much, maybe you should focus on only one thing, and what would that be?" If you stand back and look at the forest rather than the trees, the reality is that Sun does only focus on one thing. In our view, it's many of our competitors that are trying to be everything to everyone. Sun's focus is on Enterprise and Web scale computing, we are not about printer ink, TVs or cameras. If you are a customer that is deploying Enterprise and Web scale computing that needs security, high availability, high performance, dynamic scaling, open architectures, at the best value....Sun is the company for you. We build Enterprise class, open source, hardware and software that is made to solve large scale problems at the most economic price point from the desktop to the datacenter.

To achieve this integrated solution, we focus our R&D in the following areas:

Sun is the #1 leader in Open Source. We have contributed more than any other company to the open source community. EVERYTHING we make is either already open source or going through indemnification to become open source. MySQL, OpenOffice, Solaris, Java, Glassfish, PostgreSQL, and many other products are all open source. Our software runs on ANYONE'S hardware. Since we started open sourcing our software, SunFed's software revenue has gone up over 300 percent. We open source to improve security, increase quality, reduce cost, lower barrier to entry/exit, and engage developers. In fact, Sun's software leads the industry in security, and has passed the most rigorous government security protection profiles in the industry.

Sun has three supported operating systems that we focus on, we believe that an OS needs to at least run on the x86 Intel and AMD platforms to be viable. We focus on these three enterprise class operating systems: Linux, Windows, and Open Source Solaris. All our enterprise class middleware runs on these three operating systems. These operating systems are supported across our hardware platforms, we even hold world record benchmarks on Windows. Here are the support prices on the GSA schedule for each OS: RedHat - $934.78, Windows - $713.36, Solaris - $599.00. BTW, here is a copy of the production version of open source Solaris, you can get the production version for free, as many copies as you want. Also, open source Solaris focuses heavily on massive threading, since that is the way Enterprise and Web scale computing is moving.

Our servers support three chip families: AMD/Intel x64, Ultra SPARC, and the 64-way CMT. Our Intel and AMD servers are leaders in space and power reduction, and will run your Windows applications in half the space, and with 25 percent less power than HP or Dell at the same price point.Our high-end SPARC servers provide massive scale and hold world record benchmarks for large ERP and database applications. We are the first to offer a 64-way processor that will allow you to consolidate as many 64 web servers onto one low power, low cost chip (one watt per thread). Our servers start at $675.

Sun is a leader in open source enterprise class middleware. Our SOA/ESB, Database, and Identity Management products are in Gartner's top quadrants as leaders in features, value, scalability, performance, and price. We can help you with HSPD12, with SSO, and in moving to a service oriented enterprise.

Sun is one of the top three storage vendors on the market. Thirty seven percent of all the world's enterprise and web scale storage is on Sun's StorageTek open platforms. We have a comprehensive portfolio of storage and data management products across the entire range of storage platforms.

If you are looking to reduce cost, reduce your power footprint, move to open source software, consolidate and virtualize your applications, or improve scale, performance, and security... you should be talking with Sun. All of our products are designed to integrate together through open systems interfaces to deliver Enterprise and Web scale computing, that is what Sun is all about.

Posted at 01:05PM Apr 17, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[3] | Permalink

Thursday Mar 13, 2008

Bob Gourley is Enjoying his Sun Ray 270 at Home

Bob Gourley, former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) hooked up his new Sun Ray 270 at home and did a great blog on his experience.

Posted at 07:47PM Mar 13, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[3] | Permalink

Wednesday Mar 05, 2008

Flask architecture for flexible mandatory access control to OpenSolaris has been submitted to and approved by the OpenSolaris security community

I just received the best news from Stephen Smalley at the National Security Agency (NSA). A project to add the Flask architecture for flexible mandatory access control to OpenSolaris has been submitted to and approved by the OpenSolaris security community. This represents another milestone in bringing flexible MAC to mainstream operating systems and will broaden the set of platforms that support this technology. The project is a joint initiative of the NSA and Sun.

This is sooo great, we are excited about working with the NSA to add the Flask architecture to Solaris. We believe this will augment Solaris' already strong adoption and security profile. We look forward to working closely with the NSA and the Flask community of developers to extend this advanced security technology into Open Solaris.

Sun's John Weeks and Rose Mucci deserve much of the credit for working with the great engineers on the Solaris security team and the NSA to make this project move forward. My special thanks to both of them for all their hard work to make this happen.

The original project proposal and feedback can be found on the opensolaris-security-discuss mailing list. The project now has a page and separate discussion list set up.

Posted at 12:47PM Mar 05, 2008 by BVass in General | Permalink

Wednesday Jan 30, 2008

Sun Federal BoD Adds Two More

When I came over to Sun Federal about a year and a half ago, one of my top goals was to build a world-class board of directors that would be an active participant in the business. I wanted to leverage our board of directors to be advocates for our government customers and allow Sun Federal to ensure we are thinking ahead, anticipating customer challenges and offering solutions before our
customers even realize they need them.

I believe that I have met my board of directors goal and regularly tap my board of advisors. Today, I am extremely proud to announce the appointment of two additional industry experts on our board: Dr. Francis J. Harvey and William P. Crowell. Dr. Harvey served as the Secretary of the Army before retiring in March 2007 and also served on several corporate boards, including three portfolio companies of the Carlyle Group, and enjoyed a 28-year career at Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Crowell is a former CEO and president of Ca.-based Cylink Corporation and retired as Deputy Director of the National Security Agency after holding senior positions in operations, strategic planning, research, development and finance.

Sun Federal has experienced phenomenal growth over the past year thanks to the dedication of our employees and the sage leadership of our board of directors.We expect 2008 to be no different.

On another note, it's interesting to see public discussion about Sun Rays and Sun Rays at home on the Google Sun discussion group.

Posted at 03:15PM Jan 30, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[1] | Permalink

Thursday Jan 17, 2008

SunFed Solution's Portfolios

Happy New Year! I can't begin to tell you how excited we are at SunFed about the MySQL news! What a way to start off the new year. My Open Source soapbox just got a lot bigger! We have also made some New Year's resolutions....In 2008, SunFed is going to focus on communicating specific solutions - how we help government customers solve their business problems. Technology does not exist for technology's sake, it's all about how to improve the mission or business of an organization. We have narrowed our top 12 solutions down to:

Security and Information Assurance - Help users to securely share information using state-less, multi-level security workstations while enforcing restricted and isolated security boundaries and Need to Know.

Identity Management - Manage user identities and access privileges to your most critical data with minimal impact to business processes while facilitating remote work options.

SOA/ESB - Create an IT strategy to support business transformation / best practice reuse while reducing development costs and streamlining systems management, monitoring and security.

Datacenter Optimization - Improve business flexibility, competitive agility, resource usage and reduce O&M costs.

Enterprise Messaging - Improve productivity by enhancing and streamlining business critical applications (mail, calendar, collaboration) while reducing TCO and enhancing scalability.

High Performance Computing - Massively scalable, petascale integrated, open systems solutions to reduce complexity taking advantage of Sun's radical efficiency, industrial robustness and production ready capabilities.

Managed Operations Services - Offer full Sun support for closed environments fostering a preventative approach to reducing costs and complexity and addressing critical availability concerns.

Disaster Recovery / Continuation of Operations - Offer datacenter services anywhere...anytime to maintain Quality of Service and long-term organizational survival.

ECO Responsibility - Reduce O&M costs for space, power, and cooling and expanding social accountability.

Information Life Cycle / Records Management - Fulfill regulatory requirements for data retention efficiently and securely

Business Application Optimization - Improve flexibility and business agility by taking advantage of legacy applications in an iPhone age.

Speciality Solutions - Solve unique business problems like Ground Station, Video Surveillance, Visualization, Virtual Desktop, and MLS Applications.

We have even dedicated a new section to the Sun Fed website featuring our 12 solution's portfolios. Take a look.

Posted at 01:56PM Jan 17, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[1] | Permalink

Sunday Dec 09, 2007

3rd Annual DoD Open Conference

Just a quick note, on Dec. 11, I will be keynoting at the 3rd Annual DoD Open Conference at the Sheradon Premiere in Tysons Corner, VA. I plan to discuss why Sun has opened our technologies and how it benefits the government, systems integrators and citizens, as well as Sun. The event is sponsored by the Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI). Other industry and government leaders speaking include: Brigadier General Nickolas G. Justice, Program Executive Officer, Command Control and Communications Tactical (C3T), USA; Andre Boisvert, co founder of Pentaho and former president and chief operating officer of SAS Institute Inc; and Mark Tolliver, Chief Executive Officer of Palamida and former Sun Microsystems executive.

Posted at 05:08PM Dec 09, 2007 by BVass in General | Permalink

Tuesday Dec 04, 2007

Solaris vs. RHEL Comparison

I have been an open source advocate since my time at the DoD. When I was a CTO for the US Army PERSCOM, I was running over 380 Linux servers in production in 1993, when Linux was very young. Everyone thought I was crazy back then, but it worked great as a file server and web server platforms on 486s. I even replaced Solaris with Linux on Sun SPARC 3000s because it was faster than Solaris at the time, that didn't make many friends for me among the Sun sales folks.

In 2000, my wife's career forced me to leave the DoD and move to the west coast. I looked at many companies at the time, and Sun had always been a big open systems supporter. They also seemed to have the "smartest" technical people of all the companies I looked at. I took a job with Sun in 2000 and worked in Sun IT later taking over as Sun's Chief Information Officer.

As soon as I arrived at Sun I started pushing for open source and for Sun to get more involved in Linux. It was not until Jonathan Schwartz and Greg Papadopoulos started pushing along with me that we really got serious about it. I do think we were a little schizophrenic about open source for a while, with all our work on BSD, Apache, Mozilla and Open Office, then on the other side keeping Solaris closed.

That all changed about 2001, and we started internally on the path of open sourcing Solaris, and then later, embraced it all the way across all our products. It took over 5 years to open source Solaris because we had to indemnify every line of code (prove that we wrote it) and / or pay off the companies we licensed it from (we paid out over $200M to make that happen with Solaris).

Today, all our software is either open source (under an OSI approved license) or is in the process of being open sourced. We have committed at the top leadership (Jonathan / Greg / Scott/ Rich Green ) to this direction. We have been committed to this for over 3 years and you can see the proof as we have released Solaris, DTrace, Glassfish, ZFS, Java, Dir.... and we are in the process of open sourcing mail/cal, Identity, and JCAPS. Even our Sun Ray code is going through the open source process.

So at this point, we are completely committed across the company to open source. We are even open sourcing our hardware...you can't get more committed than that.

I would like to see the US Government even more committed to open source than it already is today. Some of them have started building "bonus points" into program RFPs for people that present an open source solution, and I would like to see that across ALL the RFPs. Open source is well established in the Intell and DoD communities because of their concerns about security (open source being more secure), but there are still a lot of IT leaders in other parts of the U.S. government that don't really understand open source or its advantages. I would also like to promote open formats and standards across the Federal government....it's good for security, it's good for the US, and it's good for the tax payers...

Lots of customers ask me about Sun's commitment to open source and Linux. Let me be VERY clear that Sun is completely committed to make sure Linux is supported across our systems and software platforms. All our open source software runs on top of Linux, Solaris, and Windows. And we don't just support one version of Linux, to us "Linux" means Ubuntu, Debian, SuSe, and RedHat.

There are many great things about Linux, and we love to see Linux grow, because it grows open source and choice. However, we also believe there are many great things about Open Source Solaris. Both operating systems are really Unix based, both are open source, both are multi-platform, and both are OEMed by a number a major hardware manufactures. A bunch of our customers have asked me, "OK, if Linux is great and Open Source Solaris is great, how do they compare?" So, let me give you the best information I have on comparing some of the features of both operating systems. I am using RedHat Linux only for comparison, other distributions may have different features. I welcome feedback and "corrections" to the UPDATED chart, as I get them in the comment section of my Blog I will research them and correct them in the table to make sure it is as up to date as possible.

Posted at 03:41PM Dec 04, 2007 by BVass in General | Comments[7] | Permalink

Wednesday Sep 14, 2005

Welcome to my Blog!

It just passed the one year anniversary of my internal blog that appears inside Sun. It has been an effective communication tool that is available to everyone at Sun and is getting increased visibility. So, I decided it was time to start blogging externally to give you all a window into the world of IT at Sun. So, WELCOME, and thanks for taking the time to visit. Recently when I've been travelling to meet customers in other parts of the globe I've been asked a lot about blogging at Sun. I did an interview titled "Corporate Blogging and the CIO" with Rochelle Shaw from cio-today.com where I shared my views on corporate blogging. While in Australia I did a similar interview with Renai LeMay from ZDNet Australia titled "Sun's CIO backs blogs despite lawyer worries". I hope you'll check these out, and look forward to more updates on some of the things that are important to me, and that I hope you find interesting.

Posted at 06:53PM Sep 14, 2005 by BVass in General | Permalink