OpenSolaris.org Content: A Writer's Weblog

Sept. 29th, 2007 (where does the time go?)
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The 2007 Fall event proceedings of the Sun Enigineering and Enrichment mentoring program were both well-attended and inspirational. I completed my six-month term in June and blogged about the SEED program here. The Fall event is the largest of the year and presents a great opportunity for any SEED alumni to attend, hear from new and old leaders, learn about global programs outside their own specialty, and get a sense of the questions on the minds of Sun's up-and-coming, uh, seeds.

This event began with a talk by Whitfield Diffie. Unfortunately, I missed his talk, and only caught the end of Q&A related to concerns about electronic voting and security in a contract/outsource model. Needless to say Whit has strong concerns about both areas and I can only hope to hear more on his thoughts at an upcoming wine tasting, where he is often found.

Jud Cooley presented following Whit, on the topic of Project Blackbox. The Blackbox tour has now been extended to South America and plans for Asia tour next year are underway. The box has an 8-12 week build cycle and regular production will begin with 2-3 boxes per month.

Jud talked about two major trends in the data center:

• Getting people out of the DC
  
• Over-provisioning so any failures are simply replaced globally at a set time later

Worldwide data centers produce 200M tons of CO2, Sun's contribution is 10K tons. Two blackboxes have been put into production so far. The first in Russia (Glycol installation) at MTS, the second in California at Stanford Linear Accelerator. Two more were expected in October time frame. Eleven have been built so far and 3 more are under construction.

The Q&A session about BlackBox included the following topics:

Q: What about Rackable and their recently announced competing Concentro product?
A: It is not released yet, currently is more of a one-off implementation which only supports Rackable hardware.

Q: Is there a try & buy option for Black Box?
A: (laughter)

Q: What about reliability?
A: There is no real data on reliability yet, but conceptually, reliability should be better because of increased control of the environment provided with BlackBox.

The SEED showcase followed with a presentation of Open Provisioning Toolkit (OpenPTK) by Fehrman and Sigle of SSO/Identity space. OpenPTK is for provisioning users, not software. This toolkit enables you to control and provision user interfaces with backend access, directory services, and identity credentials.

Seema then followed with a higer-level discussion of open source work. She defined the various aspects of a project that you need to be successful:

• Roadmap - voting and forums
  
• Project mgmt - timing of fixes and features
  
• Development - branches and main gate
  
• Evangelism - within and outside communities
  
• User community - trials and feedback
  
• Documentation - developer role
  
• Localization - developer role
  
• Marketing - formal events and branding
  

I was so impressed with Seema's ability to synthesize into one manageable list the most important aspects of an open source project.

Diann Olden (my new VP) began the afternoon talks with an overview of management basics that have served her well in her career path to VP of Global Product Development and Operations, currently under Rich Green. Two core values are:

-Aim High: this is your vision and mission
-Collaborate: this is teamwork and processes

To achieve 24X7 support for customers, for example, the most important processes are the hand-off processes. Efficiency and effectiveness of hand-off processes in 24X7 service world will save your bacon.

Cascading down from there, you might have committees, as follows:
-Weekly TCE: technical steering committee that ensures the strategic vision meets tactical actions
-Partners: technical managers and ppl managers, tech. mgrs. assess risk, timing & roadmap;
ppl managers are in charge of morale

Golden rule: hold yourself accountable for what you said you would do.

Always expect the following:
-The unexpected! When you get the unexpected, adjust and communicate again.
-To measure the business goals, in order: people, process, customer, quality.

Greg Papadopoulos, Ph.D., CTO, Executive Vice President of Research and Development wrapped up the day of talks. He started with open source and processes. Greg referred to Innovation Happens Elsewhere, and talked about how free software (like freedom) encourages others to work on your software, but most importantly, free software is cool and helps others to build cool stuff. Cool is the sticky part, not free.

Greg then talked about copyright and patent briefly, reminding that copyright is the right to copy, patent is the right to stop build. License is the community agreement. Greg was going to get into his 8 core values of innovation management, but took questions instead. All but a few questions were related to OpenSolaris. I'm on OSOL all day every day for two years, so I found this an interesting, but not earth-shattering discussion. At Sun, lots of questions is just lots of questions sometimes. There is a tension between S10 and Indiana, that much we know. Go to to get involved in the 200+ projects and forums underway.

DAY2-------------------------------------

Mike Splain, CTO office, started off our second day of SEED talks. He discussed the culture at Sun and defined it in simple terms: bottom-up creation; top-down synthesis. From a business strategy perspective, Mike views internet ubiquity as main driver of demand for Sun innovations. He cites the current portfolio, margins, awards, and Recommend Sun Index (RSI) as positive indicators. Negative is developer growth.

Technical alignment across enterprise and consumer functions is what we need to help adoption and to address deployer problems of today (not enough of everything: space, cooling, power). We are supposed to use CTO, PACs, and technical review committees to inspect the portfolio and then create a strategic plan. Most recently, that order has become reversed, such that we set a plan before we define the strategy and CTO office needs to fix it. What can the rest of us do to help?

• Align across Sun, reach out and make good choices about what you work on each day!
  
• Understand urgency
  
• Stay energized and aggressive
  
• Learn and tell the Sun story often
  
• Recruit
  
• Understand customers
  
• Speak up!
  

Above all else:

• Integrity and honesty
  
• Look in the mirror first
  
• Manage your own career
  
• Choose your boss and peers as carefully as you choose projects
  
• We are here to do reasonable things
  
• Get a life outside of Sun.
  

I attended the rest of the morning sessions, then had to return to regular duties that afternoon. The engineers from Beijing were wonderful to hear from, they talked about globalization, the user groups they've started in China, and University involvement there, very exciting and interesting presentation. The SEED program is just a great way to recharge worn batteries every six months by hearing from thought leaders and technical superstars at Sun, I will always make time in my schedule to participate in this awesome event.