Sometimes beauty is more than just skin deep. Sometimes something looks great and makes life easier. Sometimes a beautiful form yields better function. Sometimes Sun redesigns our sun.com home page. We don't make changes to sun.com lightly. We don't do it to follow font or color trends or add new web widgets. We do it to recognize, value and build our communities. At Sun we have student, startup, small & medium business, developer, partner, and enterprise communities. Now our communities have their own chunk of the home page. Things that interest a community are grouped together and easier to find. Pages are targeted and focused to each community's needs. Developers will quickly find the SDN or updates to the SDK. Students will find the Sun Academic Initiative and a student community page. Startups will find information, community and specialized help from Sun all on a single page.

We also now have a direct path to our top downloads. Interest in our open source software cuts across all our communities so we've placed it where everyone will see it. No searching, no navigating. Just click and download!

We're interested in what our communities think of this change-up. We want your feedback. We'll listen. Click on the feedback button and let us know.

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!

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?).

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.

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...

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.