It's October... it's the postseason... and Sun's new T5440 Server gets me thinking about the Red Sox. Bit of a stretch? Not at all. Think back to last Monday's ALDS game. The rookie - the newest guy on the team - Jed Lowrie- brought in the winning run against the Los Angeles Angels to win the game and the first-round playoff series. Same thing with the T5440 Server – Sun's newest server - paving an entirely new way in the industry, setting an all time new bar, the "way of the future" for servers.

I'm a baseball junkie... I love stats and the T5440 Server's are impressive:
• one to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus Chip Multi-threaded Technology (CMT) SPARC processors running at 1.2 or 1.4 Ghz with 8 cores,
• up to 256 threads,
• 4 SAS disks and 8 PCIe slots,
• offers a total of 512 GB memory in its 8 GB FB-DIMM Sockets,
• 4 GbEthernet interfaces on the motherboard
• supports up to 128 LDOMs

What does all this get you? Only the highest throughput (up to 4 times higher performance) in the smallest space (a 4 RU chassis) with the lowest power requirements (2 times higher performance per Watt) in the industry. What else? You get a system on a chip – integrated directly on the processor: networking, security and PCI-Express I/O. Built-in, no-cost LDOMs and Solaris Containers virtualization technologies to consolidate workloads. The industry's most open platform built on open source technologies and open standards. You get breakthrough performance, eco-efficiency and cost savings. If I weren't superstitious, I'd say it was like winning the series. But I'll wait a few weeks for that.

Now our favorite rookie Lowrie wasn't on the diamond alone Monday night. He had the Red Sox's experienced veterans Jason Varitek, Kevin Youkilis, Tim Wakefield and Big Papi right alongside him; he's part of an amazing team.

Just like the T5440 Server - part of a great team too. It has the extensive experience of Sun's award-winning Services on its side. Sun's installation, support, training, professional and managed services allow customers to get the most from their T5440 Server. Sun's Professional Services can help with migrating applications and optimizing energy usage, virtualization and performance. Sun's Managed Services give expert help on the day-to-day operational tasks of your IT infrastructure reducing down-time and improving business efficiency and service levels.

There's a live chat taking place with Jonathan Schwartz, John Fowler, EVP Systems, Masood Heydari, VP SPARC Volume Systems, and Jim McHugh, VP Solaris, on Monday October 13th at 10am PT - to register, go to sun.com/launch. You can see a recent video on the launch at This is Something and can hear the webcast replay, download whitepapers or get more info at sun.com.launch. Finally, to see how the T5440 will perform in your environment with your apps, you can try it out for FREE for 60 days WITH FULL TECH SUPPORT. And you can then buy it at 40% off. Visit Sun's Try and Buy for all the details.

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.

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!

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.

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."

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?