Addressing "anything Sun", that is: anything I come across in my role as a Specialist Systems Engineer and Infrastructure Ambassador. Your mileage may vary... Mousebits: Bart Muijzer's Blog

Some thoughts and reflections now Oracle has officially completed the aquisition of Sun, with a repost of my original feelings.

Abstract: Let's Go Oracle !!

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On April 24 2009, about 9 hours after Oracle officially announced it "had entered into an agreement to buy Sun Microsystems", I posted a blog-entry I'm reposting below. A few days after the original post I decided to remove the entry, because may people hinted me I should, pending the aquisition.

Here's the placeholder I put in at the time. Here's my current state of mind (recorded January 28 2010 -- two days after the aquisition became official). And here's what I originally posted:

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What is the color of Oracle?

Disclaimer: everything I write below are my personal thoughts and reflections and only those. Nothing is in any way related to official Sun standpoints or information.

So here I am, almost 9 hours after hearing the news that Oracle is to buy Sun. I was in my car when a collegue of mine called and told me. I didn't see this one coming, really, and disbelief was the very first reaction I had.

After a few minutes however I realized that this is true. "So now we're workingfor Oracle", my collegue said. And this remark set of a whole series of thoughts and feelings that flashed by and that I'll share here.

Is it a Good Thing or Bad Thing to work for Oracle? I don't know, honestly. When I joined Sun almost 10 years ago I choose to work for Sun, not Oracle. Since then, I've come to really really love Sun. Sun is deeply in my system. My blood is purple, so to speak. I love the things we innovated. I love the kind of people who're working at Sun: open-minded, gentle, bright, stubborn, convinced of what we do is right. I love the fact that we're a technology company (because I am a techie). I have learned so many many things at Sun, not only factual stuff but -more importantly- I was given the opportunity to develop myself as a person. I feel safe at Sun, I can be who I am, I feel valued.

Will all of this now go away? Again: I dunno. Things will change for sure but at this point I cannot judge how, when or how much. Oracle too is a technology company. One of the major reasons to buy Sun according to Larry Ellison is our beautiful Solaris Operating System. Having been an Operating System Ambassador for the past 6 years this is a somewhat comforting thought. Another thing I read from "Live-Blogging the Oracle Conference Call" is the remark made by Safra Catz, at 8:35 saying about Sun: We intend to ensure it is a profitable operating unit within Oracle. Could leave room to keep somewhat of an own identity!?

Oracle is a software company. So what will happen to the Sun hardware and its development: CMT and its planned successors, UltraSPARC64 development jointly with Fujitsu, the x64 servers designed by Andy Bechtolsheim? SunRay? Unified Storage? A great deal of uncertainty here. I've even seen rumours that HP could take over the Sun hardware with Oracle keeping the software. This still could happen although I don't think it will.

But on the software front there's uncertainty too. There's many overlapping products (IDM being one) and what will happen there? Will Oracle indeed keep Solaris as we all assume, because Larry Linux never delivered its promises?

No doubt in the next few hours or days the Internet will be flooded with opinions, maybe's, analyzes of what might happen next... I will keep a close eye and digest, combine, prune, and form my own opinion. Which, combined with what I'll hear from inside Sun will lead to more blogging.

For now, my intend is to do "business as usual" wherever I can. Because in the end, it's our Customers that make us exist and whom we should care about. No matter if this is for Sun or for Oracle. And who knows what color the blood in my vains will turn to? One sure thing is that it will take a hell of a lot of time to get rid of the Purple - if ever!!

I'll keep you posted.

BTW: The other remark that really made me realize the impact of this merger came from my wife, who said: "So, this means Sun no longer exists?". I love her for precisley this down-to-earth soundbites...

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Impression from NLOSUG booth at NLUUG spring 2009 conference on "Filesystems and Storage".[Read More]

Removed "What's the color of Oracle" entry.[Read More]

Some considerations when positioning ZFS on top of smart (i.e. non JBOD) storage.[Read More]

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Entering 2009 - some thoughts written down at the beginning of a new year[Read More]

Thanks to my friends at the Dutch UNIX Users Group (NLUUG), the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release is now available from the NLUUG archives. Here's the access info (from their announcing email).

 

ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/opensolaris
http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/opensolaris
rsync://ftp.nluug.nl/opensolaris

ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/opensolaris
http://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/opensolaris
rsync://ftp.surfnet.nl/opensolaris

Download statistics can be found at: http://ftp.nluug.nl/.statistics
ALL current and future OpenSolaris releases will be made available the same way.

Recently there was an internal poll amongst the OS Ambassadors to learn what reasons people have to choose Solaris on our own x86 hardware. As opposed to other Operating Systems like Linux or Windows. I thought it would be educational to share what's come out of this poll.

Reasons to choose Solaris on SUN x86 hardware (in no particular order):

• Technical if not superior features not otherwise available and that 'max out' the x86 hardware and peripherals. Examples:
  
• ZFS on SSD
  
• Predictive Self healing, especially the Fault Management Architecture component
  
• DTrace
• Zones and Containers
  
• One support contract (Spectrum) to cover both the hardware and the OS. This translates into a strong offering regarding Supportability levels, and creates enough granularity to implement the right level of risk avoidance for the customer
  
• No need to cross company boundaries diagnosing problems non-obviously related to hardware/firmware/OS. It's only SUN you need to talk to!
  
• The hardware itself. "Designed by Andy" (Bechtolsheim) means the hardware itself is datacenter-grade, well balanced and differentiates in the areas of powerconsumption, cooling and accessibility to the individual components.
• Hardware design innovation (ie can mix Intel/AMD/SPARC in the same Blade chassis)  
  
• No need to install third party drivers (that is: when installing Solaris on SUN x86 gear -- check out the Solaris HCLs otherwise). At a higher-level: tight integration of the hardware with (systems)software, and with the OS
• SUN is a leader in adopting the latest Intel and AMD chips. Not only by building systems based on the latest chips available, but also by tightly integrating chip-specific features with Solaris from day 1 on. Look here for some great examples by Jim Laurent of what I mean.
  
• Tight integration of the pieces in a Solaris world (FMA, ZFS, DTrace, zones, ...)
  
• Solaris on SPARC.  Only Fujitsu can make a similar claim. The benefits to customers are two-fold:
• Solaris is being developed for two platforms, resulting in an overall better product for both platforms
• Customers running Solaris (on SPARC) have a low barrier to also use Solaris on x86. From the OS layer on, everything is the same
  
• Indemnification
  
• Low barrier to exit,  i.e. Want to virtualize with VMware as an alternative, tomorrow? They've got whitepapers on phenomenal scalability on our gear.
  
• SUN runs benchmarks on SUN x86 hardware and performs finetuning to the microlevel to max out on performance and stability.

Happy choosing!

Impression of a succesful 6th meeting of the Netherlands OpenSolaris Usergroup, with talks on IPS, OpenSolaris non-technical and an overview of current OpenSolaris projects. Presentations can be found on the NLOSUG website.[Read More]

Yesterday, 1:05pm, I got the call from the nursery home: my Oma had passed away. Quietly, alone, in her sleep. She reached the age of 100 years and 10+ months.

Oma had been in bed for the past week. She no longer wanted to live. I am so glad and so grateful that I went to visit her every day and that every time she knew it was me.

I have the memories. And loads of pictures. All is like it's meant to be.

In one of my latest blogs entries I promised there was more great news to come about the distribution of OpenSolaris 2008.05 in The Netherlands. Well, here goes:

The June edition of c't Magazine has an article 'Solaris contra Linux' in which OpenSolaris is tested and described, and comes with a bootable DVD that carries OpenSolaris 2008.05 (amongst a pile of other software). The direct link is here  -- sorry, it's in Dutch only.

c't Magazine is distributed in a large (tens of thousands) amount of copies in Holland and Germany. The idea of distributing OpenSolaris with this magazine was born at the NLUUG Spring Conference and Menno Lageman, co-Sunnie, Solaris resource management guru and NLOSUG core member worked with the people of c't Magazine to create the bootable DVD.  Again, this shows what good relationships, sense of community and several hours of personal time from Menno can lead to!

From the whispersuite: Menno might blog about this in the near future... 

NLOSUG will take a short summer break but behind the screens we keep going.
Happy (summer)hacking!