I'm not green around the gills or even green with envy. I'm feeling Eco-Green! Today Sun was named to the Uptime Institute's Global Green 100 list. For three great green reasons:

Sun Booth at the Uptime Institute Symposium

• We focus on building server, storage and software products that are sustainable. Some of my favorites are the new Open Network Systems announced earlier this week (using the killer Intel Nehalem processor at 30% less power for compute, and integrated flash at 38% less power/GB) and of course the virtualization built right into Solaris and OpenSolaris. Cuz we all know that most servers are drastically underutilized - like maybe by 85% - meaning lots of the power they consume and heat they put off is a complete waste. I'm also a fan of virtualized desktops - although the SunRay in my office throws off so little heat I have to wear gloves to keep my hands warm.

• We've consolidated our Sun datacenters into eco-friendly environments, using next-gen power and cooling systems - saving 60% in power load. It took a lot of ingenuity to build those new datacenters - ingenuity fueled by the innovative minds at Sun.

• And we've built professional services expertise around that innovation. So now we're building eco-friendly datacenters for our customers - helping them to be as green as we are.

Which means next year I expect to see our customer names on the Global Green 100 list too.

Well, no more laments. Today we officially launched OpenSolaris 2008.11. And while it's always been a great operating system for all the hard stuff - like scalability, diagnosability, reliability, it's now really easy to use on your desktop because of all the hardware compatibility features and new applications built right in. So you don't have to worry about finding network device drivers, and media applications. You can just get right down to business - using OpenSolaris to build applications that will grow your business.

And when OpenSolaris is deployed in production, we're happy to provide the support. Here's a quote I love from one of our OpenSolaris customers “The level of enterprise customer service support that comes with Sun is exponentially better than what you get with other open source products and solutions. When you compare Sun with vendors such as Red Hat or Novell in the platform space, the difference is like night and day." Need I say anymore?

Today at Sun we're all bouncing off the walls because today Sun launches the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Series (code name "Amber Road"), the world's first open storage appliances. Words like "disruptive", "revolutionary", "transformative" and "radical" have been used to describe the new Sun Storage 7110, 7210, and 7410 Unified Storage Systems. Deserved or hype? I can think of three things off the bat that argue for deserved:

• an Open Architecture
• ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools and
• unprecedented, unheard of Storage Analytics.

ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools are storage stacks made from a mix of DRAM, Flash/SSD and SATA. ZFS manages this storage hierarchy as one transparent pool optimizing it to leverage the best attributes of each device. This optimization means the best performance (at about 25% the cost of traditional storage) and best energy-efficiency possible. ZFS's optimizations yields a 3.2 times faster Read IOPS, 11% faster Write IOPS and a 2 times faster raw capacity. ZFS not only optimizes for speed it also constantly runs data integrity checks to prevent any data corruption. It's not only fast, it's good.

Storage Analytics The 7000 Class Systems has a browser user interface (BUI) that radically simplifies administration tasks like configuration, maintenance (including hardware), checking shares (the 7000 line exports files systems as shares) and status (current usage of CPU, memory, storage, network, services, hardware, CIFS, NDMP, NFSv3 and v4, and iSCSI - it's pretty comprehensive and all on one page!) and, most wonderfully, DTrace analytics. In the storage world robust analytics on workloads in production just haven't existed. Now an administrator is able to look at a problem in real time - all while systems continue running in production. The Storage Analytics uses a drill-down analysis - checking the higher level statistics first and then going into finer detail based on previous findings. So, for example, things are moving along smoothly and suddenly performance is bad. With the Storage Analytics you can now ask: How many IOPS is the system doing? Which clients are causing a spike in IOPS? Let's say it's a CIFS protocol causing the problem; from that data point you'll then drill down and ask, Which Windows Client is going crazy? Is it doing more reads or writes? Which file is it reading or writing to? Before you would have been stopped at the second question. Now life is good. An administrator can quickly identify and diagnose system performance issues, and debug storage and network problems. Find it quick and fix it quick without shutting anything down. Pretty amazing. So far ahead of anything else available, you might even call it disruptive.

Sun doesn't stop at great open architecture, open storage appliances, revolutionary features like ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools, and get-it-no-where-else Storage Analytics. Sun follows up the 7000 class systems with great services. Our Professional Services is ready to help your storage migration with our Sun Unified Storage Data Migration Service. Sun's experts will migrate your storage systems quickly and securely saving you time and bringing you the full benefits of all the 7000 series features.

So now I know the CSEs are working on JESH in the NOC, which follows ITIL, and the SMGFS helps our customers with these CATK services.

I realigned those acronyms, and after removing duplicate letters, here's what I came up with: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST. Seems we're weak near the end of the alphabet. But I think I can say, it's no longer all geek to me.

Now, as to what's going on in services, we launched OpenSolaris this month at CommunityOne (a fabulous event - it you didn't get there this year, plan on it for May09. FYI, the UnBOFs were outrageously fun! Interesting henna tattoos) and we also announced enterprise support for OpenSolaris. Customers wanting to run OpenSolaris as their OS of choice now have several options for support from Sun. For support coverage, they can purchase one of two new offerings - OpenSolaris Essentials or OpenSolaris Production Subscriptions. In addition, they can receive support coverage under their existing Sun System Service Plans for Solaris, and limited coverage under their existing Solaris Subscriptions. Developers can receive support through Developer Expert Assistance.

Open doesn't have to mean alone. Product and service: that's the right combination.

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.

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!

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.

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.