Yesterday Sun sponsored an employee event in-world. I'll admit I was a skeptic, but sitting in a virtual theater with co-worker avatars is MUCH better than listening to a meeting on a phone. I hung out with friends from all sorts of real-life locales, and was able to fidget and change seats throughout the day. The talks were all great - with a focus on Sun strategy and interesting speakers from across the company.

Ya know how companies typically sponsor parties at the end of a long event? Last night I teleported into Club Java, where I was promptly animated into a great dancer by our Second Life staffers. I'm the redhead on the right, Doreen is in the middle and Lizzi is dancing up a storm in the back.

Who said I couldn't dance?

Signed, AmyO... Later

On Friday I saw a preview of the JavaOne event floor - and it's gonna be awesome! Demos, displays, Java playgrounds, village, living rooms - the community has delivered some incredible innovations this year. So if you haven't yet, make sure to register this week. See you there for the fun!

Once in a lifetime we meet someone that understands us so well, that manages us in a way we never comprehend, that makes life fun. Amazing Shelley is such a person. Thank you Shelley for all you do! Happy Admin Professionals Day.

AmyO

My Sun simulation team was great - we leveraged each other's skills and leaned on the team as we dug our heels in and stuck to our guns on open sourcing all our software. By simulation year 3, we emerged victorious in the market with the most customers and the largest community. And because we had used our [albeit fake] dollars to invest in our products, channel, community, and brand, we were positioned to keep winning in the market for years and years to come. I believe.

Life is tougher at Fenway Park - no simulation here. Manny was ejected during his first at-bat (note to self - if you're not in the game, you can have no positive impact), and Milton Bradley (why do I think of Monopoly every time he comes to bat?) hit a homer that drove in 3 to put the Rangers ahead by five. I stewed and steamed and sunned, and thankfully by the end of the eighth we were ahead 6-5. I believe.

It takes a team to win - that was clear this week. Sure Manny needed Big Papi, Dustin, and Jacoby. I needed Iain, Denis, Eric, Colin, and Octavian to keep our simulated company together. And Sun needs a bunch of other great people that I had the privilege to spend time with this week: Pammy (your Sox hat is in the mail), Jeff, Bob, Lynn, Graham, Cheri, Mark, Russ, Tony, Bev (17 years catching up!), Irene, Suchitra, Andy, Keith, Lorraine, Pavel, Ivonne, Terry, Eric, Connie (fun bus ride), Dan, Emma, Mike, Fritz, Meg, Dan (we're neighbors!), Karen, Georgios, Sivaram (thanks for the advice!), Teresa, Suzanne, Roger, Andy, and so many more. Thanks for the great learnings and all the fun!

How do you expand your business beyond existing customers and traditional revenue opportunities? Take the Red Sox for example. Fenway Park seats just under 40,000 fans and the Red Sox have sold out every home game since May 2003. But with the highest ticket prices in the majors, there's just no room for price uplift to help revenue. So the Sox launched a number of businesses that leverage their baseball success into other areas: services like FanFoto, added value product like post-game concerts that in turn sell more food and merchandise, consulting to businesses that want to market through sports, online ads, and travel packages with the team to away-game destinations.

All around us new business models are maximizing economic value. I often get asked why we open source our software at Sun, and how we can possibly make money doing that. Well, developers that use our software platforms (e.g.; OpenSolaris, Java, NetBeans, MySQL) can innovate in their applications without worrying about the scalability, reliability, and flexibility of the underlying platform. And open sourcing those platforms expands our reach to developers who don't have the funds to pay steep software licenses.

The number of people using our software increases each and every day. But we all learned at a young age that zero times a large number is still zero, so how do we make money when we give away our core software intellectual property?

Our business model today delivers support and managed services, added value products, servers, storage and consulting to empower open source deployers as they grow their businesses at Web scale. Value-added businesses that surround and enhance the open source experience. Ya know, not all that different from what the Red Sox are doing with their Fenway Sports Group business.

I had a mini vacation in Vegas this weekend - took my sweet yellow Mini Cooper to meet its community. Met a yellow twin and lots of minis making personalized statements. Even a mini-meetup at the

The thing about SAM and Q is that their attributes have been required for the medical, military, and oil&gas industries for over a decade now, which is why they are so widely deployed in those market sectors. But the need to store and retrieve large volumes of data quickly and cost-effectively is no longer a requirement limited to those markets. Heck I've got a terabyte of data at home - think about what's going on in media & entertainment, manufacturing, financial services, education...

SAM-QFS was originally developed by LSC Inc, which was purchased by Sun in 2001. I had the opportunity to work closely with the SAM-Q team when they first joined Sun: back then there was Harriet (who has had a fascinating career in high tech), the Matthews brothers and the Intern, Bob, Ted, Tom, Harold, John, Margaret, Clay, Robert, Dave, ... who did I forget? I have lots of crazy Eagan Minnesota memories with the team - like the last slot in the soda machine, the oven at the side of the road, the bratwurst barbeques. The first time I went to Minnesota to meet with them - as I was pulling out of the airport -the Hertz guy said to me "Ya ready for the snow?" Two feet by the morning! Boy was it cold, and that was in the spring! And I have warmer memories of meeting with their customers - like Robert Cecil, PhD, Cleveland Clinic’s network director. Dr Bob gave us a great tour through radiology where SAM-Q was being used to show that a tumor was shrinking, through surgery where SAM-Q provides patient data right in the operating room, and through the data center with huge tape libraries, where SAM-Q was helping to increase the quality of patient care while decreasing costs. And I remember Dr Bob speaking on a panel at a storage conference - when asked about the importance of data availability, he quietly stated that access to data is the difference between life and death. No one can express the need for data availability and integrity better than Dr Bob.

Open sourcing SAM-Q is a key step for Sun and the developer community. It's now easy for people facing large data management challenges to try something that has worked for years in large scale, mission-critical deployments. And in case you're wondering how a business can make money while making such a key asset freely availably, remember that SAM-Q runs on servers, needs to be supported in product environments, stores data on disk and tape, ...

It was a good Saint Patrick's celebration: del.icio.us corned beef and cabbage, ice cold beer and a LOUD Dropkick Murphys concert. My first exposure to the Dropkick Murphys was this past baseball season when they performed at Fenway Park before Game 7 of the ALCS, and then again on a flatbed truck in the Red Sox rolling rally, with Jonathan Papelbon strumming along on his broomstick guitar.

And community is what it's all about these days. Communities of all types and kinds, each with a purpose, but all about sharing their common interests. Take OpenSolaris for instance. According to wikipedia "OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around Solaris Operating System technology. It is aimed at developers, system administrators and users who want to develop and improve operating systems."

Given the security focus in Solaris, it's no wonder the U.S. National Security Agency announced this past week that they are joining the OpenSolaris community to collaborate on new security mechanisms for operating system.

The cool thing about communities is members can chose the level to which they want to participate. The luck of the Irish was with me on Saturday - before I left for the concert, my teenage daughter warned me that moshing is big in the Dropkick Murphy community. So I chose to enjoy the celtic punk tunes from the venue's balcony - and in case you haven't seen moshing, there's a great YouTube video on it that totally had me rolling on the floor with laughter. Slainte!

If you're wondering why I just reposted this entry (St Patty's Day really was last week and I haven't been at the bar this whole time ), I fumble-fingered my blog and managed to unpublish this entry. Sorry about that!

Most of my previous blogs have been about our Storage strategy at Sun. This past summer I moved into a similar role in Sun's Software group. What does that mean? Well even though I've got a new job, a new title, a new boss, and a new BU, it all feels pretty familiar.

While storage is all about data...keeping it, replicating it, archiving it, retrieving it, it's the software that provides the special sauce in managing data efficiently. Which is why when we talk about data integrity, scalability, and performance for unstructured data...ZFS is the answer. ZFS ROX. It must be true. There's even a license plate to prove it.

But what about structured data....how 'bout a database? How 'bout the world's most popular open source database? Last week, Sun announced we are acquiring MySQL. Rich Green blogged about how this is a good match on a company level - we're both big believers in open source, both have active contributing communities, both focused on the web economy. That's all good. Again, big changes, new stuff, but also somehow familiar.

But how do we match up on software? A good fit? ZFS and MySQL databases are a lot alike. Twins separated at birth? Well, customers use the same adjectives to describe the two: easy to use, reliable, flexible/scalable, great performance. Nice. Happily the differences between the software, and they are different, not twins but rather siblings who actually get along (does that happen?), complement each other: ZFS managing the storage of unstructured data and MySQL managing the use of structured data.

Kinda like my two teenagers - Danielle the structured just about taking over her college; Tara the unstructured defining her own home schooling plan... Absolutely love 'em both!

I grew up in New England, so I'm used to the snow. Back over a decade ago, a collegiate from California came to town during a storm and remarked "I can't believe how much work you have to do, cleaning snow from your cars, driveways, ...". That was a little disheartening - should I move to CA and never shovel snow again? Just when such thoughts start to take hold, the skies open up and the flakes start falling. Inconvenient but beautiful. Definitely worth the shoveling (even better with teenagers in the house to help!). Here are some pics from Monday this week.

Hard work and sweat, day after day, year after year. Even the Aussie Floyders. I can't imagine the stamina it takes to put on a show like that, and the energy it requires to move and reassemble all that equipment night after night, state after state, concert after concert. And as a rabid fan all around, I've always appreciated the hard work put in by my teams and bands. Truly, with two amazing concerts and three (almost) undefeated football teams - it was a really enjoyable weekend enabled by a lot of hard work behind the scenes.

Yesterday morning I ran into my pal Joe on the way into the office. Joe led the team that integrated our CIFS server into OpenSolaris, which is very cool because it makes OpenSolaris even more interoperable in Windows environments. This also means the open source world has the tools to build storage arrays and systems, and innovative new solutions for data management problems. And it didn't come easy - Joe's team has been working on this for a long, long time and by the look in his eye I could tell there were some weekends when they didn't get to the concerts and football games.

Yup, I really enjoy good music, good football and good software. But it's the hard work behind the scenes that makes it all worthwhile.

Now's my time to brag. My daughter's friends recently found an old TV for their college apartment. In exchange for some development on the TV repairman's web site, their old TV is now broadcasting Red Sox games in high def to a very appreciative, and broke, college crowd. A resourceful crowd that somehow managed to scrape up the $ for cable service.

What these enterprising young college students did was take something offered for free, and tune it up in a way that fit with their economic model - or rather - their meager wallets. And the cable company benefits. A lot like what happens with the many developers out there joining open source communities. They take the software for free, use it, change it to fit their needs, give something back to the community, and then think about paying for commercial service to enhance their free experience.

Earlier this week IBM announced they are joining the OpenOffice.org community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software... to help expand the use of the Open Document Format (ODF) ... to donate accessibility features from their work on Lotus Notes.

Seems like this is a good thing for consumers. Definitely worth all the noise.

The most paranoid reaction I got was from the poor hotel clerk who was helping me to get wireless working in my hotel room. I didn't figure out until later that he probably thought I would blog about a bad Internet connection - maybe I couldn't even post my blog because of it? I'm not a rampant consumer blogger though, and I'll confess now that I had inadvertently hit the wireless switch on the side of my laptop, so it wasn't even the hotel's fault that I couldn't connect.

It was interesting to see who commented when I wore the t-shirt while working at our Menlo Park campus: one IDC analyst, our analyst relations lead, an incredibly nice Sun communications manager (she introduced herself and exclaimed "what a great shirt" as I passed her in the courtyard), a Sun executive who really likes black t-shirts, and my product marketing buddy who really likes black shoes...

Cluster File Systems' use of ZFS as the disk filesystem inside Lustre is a perfect example of how open source can be used to advance the state of data management. Lustre is a distributed filesystem that can run across thousands of clustered server nodes, all sharing potentially petabytes of data. And like the challenges faced by anyone trying to manage large data sets these days, Lustre needed better scalability, reliability and storage management features than those available in their current internal disk filesystem. So the makers of Lustre had a few choices: start developing enhancements to their existing internal filesystem, build a new one, or pick one up from another open source community. Turns out to be an easy choice - ZFS is a 128 bit filesystem (more scale than any of us can use these days), has built in data integrity through its checksumming algorithms, and handles storage management internally via RAIDZ (no need to define RAID stripes and disk pools separately). Most requirements Lustre had and probably some they haven't even thought of yet are satisfied by ZFS. It's pretty cool that ZFS is solving out-of-this-world problems.

A friend emailed me this picture she took in the Palo Alto Fish Market parking lot of this weird green-glowing thing about to take off...

Click on image for more information.

Seems like ZFS might really be out-of-this-world... [yeah, I know, maybe her camera phone just doesn't take clear shots ]

But I wonder if George and Brad know just how awesome the SL8500 actually is. Do they know, for example, an SL8500 can hold a petabyte of data - about two hundred thousand copies of their Oceans Thirteen movie? Do they know that if the Bank Casino used 1000 cameras to gather their surveillance data and stored that data for 30 days, they would fill the tapes in an SL8500? And in interests of saving the planet, do they know tape is about 25 times less expensive to power and cool than disk because it uses that much less energy? All great news for the IT budget and the planet.

I spent some time this week with our Media and Entertainment sales team - to say the data in M&E is exploding is a complete understatement. One customer digitizing TV shows is expecting to have 50 petabytes of metadata to enable all the searches they need to handle - never mind the raw entertainment itself! And the M&E industry is heading full steam ahead into complete digitization, consumer mashups, affiliate communities... Data, data, and more data. No wonder why many cool web sites are using SL8500s to help store that data.

So, sure Brad and George were cast for the Ocean's movies because they're so hip, but our SL8500 certainly fit right in with the Ocean gang on their latest caper.

We've discovered the same thing about storage systems. A few years ago you could get storage in just a couple flavors - the original block devices or file storage that came on the scene in the 1990s. Both had just a few data services floating around the bottom like olives for additional flavor. But now that the world is starting to build storage systems using standard server technology and general purpose operating systems, more and more flavors of storage are seeing the light of day. Flavors dictated by the problem facing the customer, not by the layout of data on some physical media. Flavors formed by the application dealing with the customer problem, not by speeds and feeds.

This week a team of specialists in the UK tackled a big problem faced by our European telco customers - the controversial EU Data Retention Directive with a new Secure Data Retrieval Server that leverages an X4500 server, Solaris 10 operating system, and some partner software build purposely to solve this type of problem. The UK team didn't have to spend years negotiating a product spec with large engineering teams - our engineering teams and our partner community had already empowered them with the ingredients to build a compliance solution specific to the needs of those European businesses dealing with the new EU legislation.

Someone asked me today if the announcement of the Secure Data Retrieval Server means we're no longer committed to Honeycomb. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fact is, our coffers are full of ingredients, and while our Honeycomb team is working hard with customers and ISVs in healthcare and digital libraries, our team closest to the problems facing European telcos found the combination of the X4500, Solaris, and CopperEye created a great solution.

Because when a vendor has the right ingredients, customers have choice.

Besides the technology, one of the interesting things in the storage industry right now is the general consensus that data management needs to be handled by an end-to-end system, not just a storage box. Take virtualization - instead of virtualizing arrays behind a block storage controller, customers might choose to automate storage processes to support server virtualization. And CDP - as Nigel says "A year ago you could swing a cat and hit a CDP product", and now people are approaching CDP more cautiously because they just don't understand their data well enough to know where they need those types of RPOs. BTW, Nigel is a cat person, so no need to call out the SPCA as I don't think he would actually swing one around by the tail. And then there's de-duplication - are you really ready to let a computer decide which data should be deleted? We all still have lots of work to do with our customers before automatic deletion of data - in order to save storage space - will be a reality.

And as my luck would have it, Nigel - a die-hard Yankees fan - came to Boston the one time this year when the Sox are losing and the Yankees winning. He tried hard to rub it in, but then again, the Sox are still over 10 games ahead of those pinheads, oops I mean pinstripes in the AL East. Ha! But Nigel did make an impression on the nice guy who drove us from meeting to meeting: Kevin's parting words were "Finally after all these years of driving, I've met a Yankees fan I like."

The difference between "open" and "free" jumped right out at me last time I visited our Colorado office. The Colorado NW Parkway, which cuts a dreary 20 minutes off the drive to and from DIA, is open for me to use anytime. But the $6 tolls certainly don't make it free of cost. Yet while one is about liberty and the other economics, there is a relationship between the two...

The biggest open in my life lately is open source, an interesting development methodology for building solutions to challenging problems. The openness of source code is governed by a license that dictates terms with which a developer must use the code - for example, must all modifications automatically be made available to the community as in the GPL (used for Java) or can a developer hold some back as in the CDDL (used for Solaris)? Check out the plate I saw on a truck parked at the movie theater last weekend - based upon other bumper stickers I could tell the owner was a Linux fan - but if the truck was actually covered by the GPL, the rights to any truck modifications would actually go back to the truck manufacturer. Certainly this is a simplistic view on licenses, but you get the picture.

And while open source doesn't equate to free product cost to customers, there is an interesting relationship. Some customers might find it cost effective (again, depending upon licensing) to build their own infrastructure with open source. ISVs might chose to contribute extensions to an open source community to enable said ISV to offer a layered product at additional cost. Economics dictate how each uses the source code and economics will dictate how the use changes over time.

I recently heard the IT team from a large bank lamenting the high cost of software licenses - while they're thrilled processing costs continue to drop, software that is licensed per CPU or per core is killing their budgets. While open source won't directly help with their problems (the software application in question is not available via an open source community), there is work being done in open source that will eventually help. Open source lowers the bar for new players to come in and offer competing solutions - new players that can bring different economics to the game, eventually unseating software incumbants with high costs.

So yeah, I appreciate that the CO NW Parkway is a choice for me when I have barely enough time to catch my plane. And I'll deal with the $6 (Humm, I could expense it... Or I could just blow past the tolls while talking on my cellphone, like one of my coworkers who shall remain nameless - or is that a license violation?).

We've certainly tried that approach at Sun; we've even acquired companies to help us in those attempts. But we always come back to our core of openness, partners, and innovation. So while the traditional focus has been around creating the mother-of-all-storage-management-dashboards, we've been focused on inventing better data management engines, advocating storage standards and delivering application-enabled device management.

Now don't get me wrong, some customers still need that dashboard. So for years now we've offered one that is considered best-of-breed on that market. And we're happy to look to one of our strategic partners for the development of that product. And some in the traditional storage industry also don't give you credit when you partner for a piece of your portfolio - but partnerships are an essential part of our strategy at Sun.

Let's talk about our areas of focus:

1. Innovation in data management - with Solaris and ZFS, we've got the automatic transmission for storage. No more deciding how to lay out volumes, which RAID to configure, etc. It's all built right in, and it's all automated.

2. Storage standards - After spending decades in the networking world, where you're nothing if you aren't open, when I started working in storage a couple years ago I was amazed at the API swapping that was going on. Thank goodness for SNIA and the Storage Management Initiative (SMI). Finally vendors are working to comply to open standards, rather than hoarding their interfaces for themselves and special friends. At SNW last month, I participated in a SMI Executive Luncheon where we discussed not only where SMI should go next, but also our commitment as key storage vendors to that standard. There were 30 of us in that room, and the majority of us knew that our future success, and that of our customers, depended upon open standards. Sure you could still see some feet dragging, but the storage world is finally becoming open. At Sun we're also working really hard in the object and file spaces too - in the near future look for XAM and NFS changes that will make data management just that much easier.

3. Application-enabled device management - we've got lots of storage devices in our portfolio, and we're focused on ensuring they have the best device management possible. So there are two things going on here - first we're using standards to talk to the devices, second we're setting up the devices so that the apps using them will work well. On the disk side of the house, we have our Common Array Manager, which speaks SMI-S on the bottom to configure and manage arrays, and supports application profiles on the top. On the tape side of the world, we just released ACSLS v7.2 today (that's our Automated Cartridge System Library Software), which now uses PostgreSQL as its underlying database management system. And we're working to continue integrating all the great backup management software that came to us through STK (and it came to STK through their acquisition of Storability) with ACSLS - bringing the best of tape virtualization management together with backup management. Not to mention all sorts of data protection software and automated archive software, etc, etc. All that on top of a wide system of partners and an open source community.

Considering this is my longest blog entry yet, it's amazing there are those who don't think Sun has much in the way of storage management software. Perhaps we're just counting differently in the new world.

It was all sweet at JavaOne this week... JavaFX, OpenJDK , Java SE , Java Devices, Java games, Java shirts, Java everything. But who would have expected a Java storage system, with built-in search and a Java API? A Java storage system with an open source community?

This is a first for us at JavaOne. Our Honeycomb fixed content system has Java APIs (C too), so that an application developer can easily structure how they want to store and search massive amounts of data. And we're using OpenSolaris and other open source communities to help further define these APIs. We also gave out the Honeycomb SDK on these cute memory sticks at JavaOne.

Our developers are busy working to release source code for the initial Honeycomb client and server implementation. We're targeting Fall 2007 for that, so there's lots going on and lots more to come. Meanwhile, join our Honeycomb development team in the OpenSolaris community for some good discussions about where we should be taking the Java API for this project.

Now take the example of NFSv4.1 - the latest version of the NFS spec being worked in the IETF. In opensolaris.org you can find an NFSv4.1 client that anyone (yup, anyone from any company) can use to help get their NFSv4.1 server implementation going. Which helps advance what shows up at Bakeathons and Connectathons. Which helps advance the spec more quickly. Which should help get better solutions into customers hands earlier. All enabled by an open source community of developers listening to each other in order to get to a common goal.

On a slightly different note, check out this pic of a baby owl nesting at our Sun Broomfield campus. Thanks to my pal Steve G for letting me know I was walking past some shrubbery where the little one hangs out. And mucho thanks to the guy in Building 6 who pointed to mama owl eyeing me from up above as I quickly snapped the picture... I got away with my head intact. Remember the wise old owl poem? "A wise old owl lived in an oak. The more he saw the less he spoke. The less he spoke the more he heard. Why can't we all be like that wise old bird?"

Let's set the background: First, we actually did grow up with respect to our storage portfolio (certainly a lot had to do w/ Sun's acquisition of STK). Check out the storage products we announced at SNW: our Low Cost Array, the library partitioning (ha – the only library on the market that can be shared between mainframes and open systems), our incredible file browser that lets you see across tiers of storage. New conversations are always easier when people believe you understand the old conversations. Second, the stage continues to change with exploding data growth (exabytes, exabytes, exabytes) and extensive retention periods (decades, decades, decades). When it comes to data, it's just not the same world it was last year, or the year before, or the year before that... And last but certainly not least, general purpose technology has caught up with the performance and reliability demands of storage - there's little need to build the world's storage from scratch anymore. Out with the custom ASICs and boards, out with the real-time embedded kernels. In with x64 servers, volume CPUs, Ethernet, and the general purpose operating system. So if you can build storage from general purpose hardware and software (check out the Thumper), what's next?

Open source, of course. Once you move from the proprietary to the general purpose, you can take advantage of all that world has to offer. Which is why on April 10th we announced an open source community for storage – because we're making the entire storage I/O stack within Solaris available via the opensolaris.org storage community. So customers and partners working to solve the world's toughest data management problems now have access to the source code and the developers of the world's best operating system.

Now that we've hatched our storage open source community, interest from storage analysts, press, customers, and partners is overwhelming. The ugly duckling has truly become the swan.

A few years ago I lost a wallet and spent about a week hunting down #s, dealing with nerves over what might show up on one of my accounts, and driving carefully so as not to get pulled over sans-license-on-hand. Wed night the only thing I was nervous about was the fact that I wasn't nervous about the wallet loss, only the game loss (all right, so we're overly emotional in Boston when it comes to the Sox).

I bonded with my online world that nite - those faceless people helping in my time of stolen-wallet/bad-baseball distress - geez, sounds like the theme of a crass TV commercial. But no TV for me, I'd rather go read some interesting blogs (like this one, or this one, or this one), see what's up in open storage land, IM my teenagers... just generally basking in the warmth of my digital world.

And talk about using the proverbial can opener on storage. We're opening up storage today with our new open source community for storage developers. You'll find filesystems, data services, drivers - all in an open source operating system that scales, is secure, highly available, and reliable.

Too much more to talk about now. I just heard those Opening Day fighter jets fly over our Burlington campus. While I'm checking out our opensolaris storage community, I gotta tune into MLB.com for updates on the Red Sox. BTW, ever check out how MLB.com actually feeds us all that real-time data?

Earlier this week I was with an account team discussing Sun's whole portfolio with a global bank. First the server guys pitched... I love listening to SEs talk with customers - each one has a unique and interesting twist on their area, with cool tools, interesting data [not to mention insightful opinions that we can wrap back into product strategy] and excellent technical explanations that get to the meat of a customer's decision. Oh, the delicate balance between chip frequency and memory speed leading into CMT was a delightful discussion! Then the software dudes took over - Java, Solaris, open source, more Java, more Solaris, more open source...

At 4:58 PM the software dudes contritely ceded the platform to me, leaving me just 2 minutes to explain our storage strategy. A few years ago I would have been in miserable trouble. But we are building storage from general purpose computers and general purpose operating systems - Sun's x64 and UltraSPARC systems and Solaris 10! And of course, that's what we had just spent the last few hours discussing with this customer.

Granted it took me a few more than 2 minutes to explain the changes in the storage industry that are driving us in this direction. Data is exploding - multiple exabytes of new data being created every year! And the tradition in the storage industry has been to build special purpose hardware and software to manage that data. This custom and proprietary strategy worked because the performance and reliability requirements of storage just couldn't be met with off the shelf computing. Not anymore! When we think about what we need in a storage OS - it's reliability, availability, security, performance, data integrity, ... When I listened to my software colleague talk yesterday about Solaris, it was all about reliability, availability, security, performance, data integrity, ... And a few more cool things thrown in for good measure, like observability (DTrace), virtualization (containers), "better than RAID6" software RAID (in ZFS) and so on. All with a developer community consisting of Sun Storage, Sun Software, and Sun Server engineers, along with our partners and the world participating in our open source efforts. Why would I want anything but Solaris to manage my data?

And what about storage controllers and their processors? We've got them coming out the you-know-what... Fast, cool, space-saving, really sweet storage controllers. We just happen to also call them servers.

People in every division of Sun are working on very interesting storage solutions, which makes it was easy to explain our storage strategy. Good thing, because I hate being the person between a hungry group of people and their dinner.

Now I spend my time talking to execs, customers, analysts, employees about how our cool technical inventions here help to make the world a better place - a fun position to be in when you actually have cool technical inventions to discuss, like Solaris, like Thumper, like ZFS. So I've been feeling pretty pleased with myself...

Then last week at a leadership conference our very own CEO Jonathan Schwartz said “The Geeks are in Power”. When you look at life in a cube these days (metaphorically speaking again, because who actually works in a cube?), who is more connected than the developer? Write some code and share it with the world... Create a community of like-minded individuals to build something bigger than you can build yourself... Give away your inventions and STILL help your company make more $ than it's made before... Maybe it's time to hang up the heels and go back into the cube...

I'm sure Riley was trying to achieve a state of Zen-ness with his hard work at this garden... look at the dinosaurs intertwined with the soldiers... the piles of rocks... even a pen cap thrown in for good measure... (is that uncapped pen lurking in the cushions of my chair?) And while the contemporary artists among us might relax with the results, the more conventional like me were just exhausted by the time Riley and dad left for the day.

And how is this related to storage you might ask? This is exactly what happens when you take special purpose storage technology from the 90s, running single threaded operating systems on specially built boards, and you put it into today's world. How can you run your Web 2.0 application on your storage system? Once you move aside the dinosaurs and pen caps, you're left with nothing but a mess of firmware trying to handle sectors, slices, and spindles.

That's why we're building our storage systems today with general purpose hardware and software. That's why we think Thumper matters. Because our world today is different. We've got to rake the dinosaurs, pen caps, and soldiers out of storage and give today's developers a better way to manage their data.

Congrats to all the great engineers that made this happen over the past 10 years: Jim², John, Mark, Simon, Phil, Marcus, Jeff, Paul, George... who did I forget? And we're getting really good feedback from interesting customers building large web infrastructures. Developers that need to do new and interesting things to protect the volumes of data their customers are creating.

We're open sourcing more and more software all the time. Join our developer network to get in on the fun.

Check out the Big is Bad emblem on the tow-hitch - a perfect statement. But this big bad thumper isn't nearly as eco-responsible as our hybrid data storage server at Sun. Our x4500 data storage server holds 24 TB of data in a 4U of rack space, starting at $2/GB. A data storage server that can run any application - right on the storage system itself!

We're building new storage systems like this just because there's too much data in the world. Too much to just shove away on a block storage device and forget about. Too much to simply spool to a tape and ship offsite. Data today matters to more and more people over longer and longer periods of time. Data that has to be accessible when it's needed. You know what that means? It's not so much about how you store it - sure there are tons of options for disk and tape to meet your performance, reliability, scale, etc needs - its really about the applications you use to retrieve it for use again and again...