Wednesday October 25, 2006

Dot BEYOND Dot Com

Not so long ago, Sun hardware and the Solaris operating system used to be synonymous with having an Internet presence of any kind. Then the NASDAQ crashed, the bubble burst and unfortunately Sun and Solaris pulled back from its position of pre-eminence.

Fast forward to 2006. Sun is back into the game with AMD 64 based Opteron servers. And then, there is Solaris 10!

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, Solaris 10 now ships with a recent release of BIND 9, the defacto standard implementation of DNS client and servers on Unix/Linux. What better than the stringent performance and security requirements of one of the nodes of a root DNS server to demonstrate that Solaris 10 can do the heavy lifting of virtually anything one can throw at it?

Solaris 10 now powers one of the global nodes of F-Root, itself one of the 13 root DNS servers of the Internet. Just one more confirmation that Solaris 10 is helping Sun get back to its position of eminence. ( Oct 25 2006, 07:47:19 PM PDT ) Permalink

Monday October 16, 2006

Tamarack

Coming soon to a Solaris Express build near you is an exciting new project called Tamarack. The project name is taken from the road on which one of the team members has a mountain cabin and the logo is inspired by its namesake restaurant and casino in Reno, which is not surprising when the release vehicle is codenamed Nevada!
For several years and multiple releases, Solaris has had a sub-par user experience with removable media and hotpluggable devices compared to competetive desktop environments. The solution was incomplete, complex, and did not integrate with the desktop.

Enter Tamarack!

Whether it is a memory stick or a secure digital device, a digital camera or an IPod, a music CD or a blank DVD-ROM media, Tamarack seamlessly

integrates with the desktop to bring a significantly enhanced user experience compared to previous releases of Solaris. More importantly, Tamarack does this via a modern, open source and extensible framework, HAL.

Getting Tamarack

For those of you running OpenSolaris and interested in trying out these features, watch for the announcement of the Build 54 release! Add Vermillion (build 54 and higher) and you are good to go! Don't forget to send us feedback, because there's more good stuff to come! We expect to extend the HAL framework to support power management and networking. We are also thinking about the possibility of having Bluetooth driver functionality integrated.

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( Oct 16 2006, 02:04:31 PM PDT ) Permalink

New gig

I haven't posted here for a really long time. I guess now is as good a time as any to update my blog with what I have been doing recently.

For starters, I am now a software development manager in the KISS (Keep it Simple, Solaris) organization managing a team working on Network and I/O Approachability.

Specifically, this means I manage multiple networking and I/O projects that will make Solaris more "approachable" or which automate configuration where and when it makes sense. I will be describing various exciting initiatives and projects in this space.

( Oct 16 2006, 11:45:53 AM PDT ) Permalink

Monday May 23, 2005

Yet another Hello World! Well its 2005 and its time for this dog to learn a new trick. So without further ado, here is my entry into the blogsphere.

I have been at Sun for 8 years now and an engineer in Solaris Networking for most of that time. I used to work in the Naming and Directory Services organization however several reorganizations later, I find myself in KISS - which is Keep it Simple, Solaris!

I hope to update the blog with stuff I have worked on and stuff that I find interesting. ( May 23 2005, 02:58:34 PM PDT ) Permalink