Friday May 13, 2005

Solaris 10 internal deployment update

I run a Solaris 10 Java Desktop Change Acceptance Review meeting every Friday afternoon. Which means I can give you a Solaris 10 Sun internal deployment status update. As of today 196 Sun machines have been upgrade to Solaris 10. 108 of those are Sun Ray servers. We have had an pretty good response from users reporting issues. I think the production deployment will be very strong because of all our internal user testing. Our biggest problem is that many people in Sun are skeptical about the value of actually filing a trouble ticket so they don't bother. Obviously we can only improve our deployment and the quality of our support if people report problems and if necessary provide feedback when they aren't confident that the problem is understood and properly handled. One tool we have used to capture situations where we don't hear about problems is a feedback alias. That has worked fairly well.

update: I should have made it clear that the numbers of S10 machines above is just for IT managed infrastructure servers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of desktop and laptop machines running Solaris 10 as well as a lot of application servers.

Wednesday May 04, 2005

Progress with Conversion of Sun to Solaris 10

As I've blogged before we are converting our infrastructure to Solaris10. Last weekend we converted a 500+ person site in Oregon so that Solaris 10 is their default SunRay environment. Up until now we have only converted a few servers at each site and have asked users to voluntarily start using Solaris 10. I've been using Solaris 10 all day every day for everything I do. I am very happy. In Oregon we converted the whole fail over group so Solaris 10 is the default SunRay environment for everyone. There were no major S10 problems although we did receive a lot of feedback about issues that we either need to fix in our configuration or that we need to add to our user FAQ.

We are also upgrading to a new version of Mozilla at the same time and we did run into some issues with that. The SAs are working through all the issues.

For our first big conversion it went pretty well. I am happy with the progress.

Tuesday April 12, 2005

Solaris 10 roll out

We are beginning to roll out Solaris 10 on more and more Sun Ray servers. Right now people are being asked to utswitch to these servers and test. We want to find any problems and do any tuning we need to do as soon as possible. The more people we have running on Solaris 10 the better. We also are sending out surveys to all the sites that have been asked to use the Solaris 10 servers. So far the feedback has been almost completely positive. We did get one response today about problems with an application which we haven't heard before. We are looking into it. Our goal is to have the pilot configuration installed on up to 70% of Sun's infrastructure by June 30. So far so good.

Wednesday March 09, 2005

Adding value to Solaris

I found Kathy Sierra's blog because of a link on James Governor's Monk Chips blog. But I really liked what she had to say in her Creating Passionate Users Blog about how successful products make it easy for others to add value to a product. She used the example of how hard it is to compete with the iPod because of all the add ons that have been created by others. At first I thought that this concept only applied to consumer products. But then I realized that in the case of an operating system like Solaris, drivers are a similar example. By making Solaris open source Sun has made it very easy for others to add value to Solaris. Hopefully as she suggests this leads to more passionate Solaris users.