On the origins of Bag Pipes - and why Pyramids matter

Recently I had the pleasure to visit Egypt - a definite emerging market with a vivid Vodafone being very active. A fascinating mix of old and new, with a deserved proud feeling for history make for a thrilling experience. And as always, visiting a place makes you understand a lot more about why business there is as it is. Take this, what is odd about this picture:

What's odd is that nothing is odd. I always associated bag pipes with Scottish Highlands. I learned it has a much longer history and definitely belongs to the ancient egyptian "music scene". Who would have thought?
Have you been traveling recently? Getting off the airplane, you have a good chance of a greeting by Vodafones John Tranter:

As a truly global company with networks in 27 countries and partner networks in another 33 (if I ever heard about a clever "franchise" model, this is one!), a whole new set of opportunity - but also challenges arise. It is a good part of our job to help with that. Meeting in Cairo, we had the opportunity to share ideas with people from Sun, Vodafone and partners from around the globe. There is no better place to do this, and everyone went home with an added feel for the great things we can do in emerging markets and around the world if we share our ideas.

Almost five thousand years looking at us - a sight that will be hard to surpass - a giant achievement to build the pyramids - and make them last for so long. It really gives you a perspective on large challenges - imagine you where the poor little fellow laying the first stone for that.
Eventually great achievements are completed and delivered - Sun had one such moment July 11 (and I am happy to say we have a number of those last year, and continue that tradition this year). We announced our new X4600 8-Socket Opteron Server - 16 cores - a _lot_ of compute power.
Even more interesting really is what our Boss Jonathan writes about here: the X4500 data server, 24 Terrabytes in 4 Rackunits with 2 Socket Opteron:

Tim O'Reilly had a bunch of good commets on Web 2.0 and X4500 - this is the device for the new emerging Internet.
The Industry has gone round and round on Blades - let me have Andy Bechtolsheim, a Sun founder, tell you why.
And if you wondered what you could do in reality with all of the above, introducing the new worlds 7th largest Supercomputer, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, build of out these systems.
What does this mean for Vodafone?
First, Solaris on x86 has more ISV applications than RedHat or Suse - and way more than HP-UX, a very dead OS - plus you get all the advantages of Solaris. There is no difference in functionality between Solaris on x86 and Sparc - Containers/Zones, dTrace, ZFS, all the good stuff. ZFS alone means you never need to pay Veritas for a Volumemanager again - nor do you even need to worry about Volume Management. Way over 5 million Solaris licenses downloaded to date - yes they are free, Sun makes money on the support if you want it - and most of them running on HP, IBM and Dell servers - who would have thought Sun quickly becomes the OS Vendor for HP, IBM and DELL?
Jonathan likes to be quoted with "Frankly, Dell, HP and IBM are now channel partners." - way to go. And once you run Solaris, the step to realize you should put on the Java Enterprise System Software stack from Sun as your Middleware, Availability, Web, Applicationserver and Identity Solution is a small one. Vodafone already has a Java Enterprise System license in most areas, licensed per employee - no more core/processor or user counting.
Then the X4500 "Thumper" Server serves as a data staging, media streaming and bulk storage device, and also as an applicane for running applications requiring a lot of storage - e.g. indexing and data mining.

Last but not least the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System - finally a blades System which will last you 5-7 years including all the processor upgrades AMD and maybe others do in that time - it has the cooling and power to do that. It is really impressive - we got the "Very well engineered, did we already buy some of them?" from Vodafone last week on a presentation. Ten 8 way blades per chassis, two chassis per rack. And when AMD launches Quad-Core, say 16 way blades. Octal Core anyone?
Blades in the market are pretty wrong so far - they usually lump CPU and IO onto the blade. The Sun Blade 8000 disassociates IO from the Blade, look at the rear:

While the blades have CPUs, memory and hot-swap discs their PCI-Express goes out a passive backplane to the rear, where you get two dedicated PCI Express Modules (an industry standard, hot swap PCI-Express cards you can buy from many vendors) per blade plus the shared virtual Network IO Switches in the middle - and when you upgrade either blades or IO you dont have to touch the respective other side. More even, as the Chassis only contains a passive wire backplane, it will outlast many updates on IO Technology. Very well engineered indeed, and managed exactly the same as all the other Sun x64 boxes, using N1 System Manager.
And while all this is "just" Hardware - these are some of the new infrastructure building blocks for solutions, and we should never underestimate the importance of that over all the solutions talk. And while Sparc is a very much alive platform with the UltraSparc T1 based servers just delivering stunning performance at lowest energy consumption - we blogged about this earlier - Sun's x64 Server line is a must see.
Talk to you soon,
Olaf
Posted by mobiletechnology ( Jul 24 2006, 08:17:03 AM CEST ) Permalink