Addressing "anything Sun", that is: anything I come across in my role as a Systems Practice Solutions Architect. Your mileage may vary ;-) Mousebits: Bart Muijzer's Blog

Some thoughts on the day I am 10 years with Sun...[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]

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

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!

Some reflections on 2007 and some looking ahead into 2008.[Read More]

Steps describing how to install Sun Logical Domains (with links)[Read More]

Impressions of the seminar on Virtualization, held at the headquarters of Sun Microsystems Nederland, March 8 2007. Soundbite: sharing is key![Read More]

Plugging the first OpenSolaris Developers Conference (OSDEVCON) in Berlin, February 27 to March 2, 2007[Read More]

Limited time: Sun offers free DVD media kit which includes the Solaris 10 Operating System for both SPARC and x86 platforms as well as Sun Studio 11.[Read More]

The first public meeting of the NLOSUG was a massive success! Here's why.[Read More]

Announcing the Netherlands OpenSolaris Usergroup (NLOSUG) inaugural meeting: OpenSolaris exposed (gurus are in)![Read More]

I talked to Jonathan Schwartz! [Read More]

Impressions of "my" CEC 2006 [Read More]

One of my customers mailed me this image (the original is here).


 


I must admit I did smile when I went over the different pieces. However, at the same time I realized that this might exactly be one of the reasons we could do better as a company. Bad Marketing? Maybe. At the very least I could try to explain what the different pieces really mean and how they fit together:

• Destroy Microsoft Somehow - most, if not all of our customers have a mixed environment and a large part usually consists of some kind of Microsoft-based environment. Fighting Microsoft is no good for anyone so instead of doing that, Sun decided to get into a partnership with Microsoft with the intend to have our joint customers benefit from that. One example of a positive result is that the latest Sun Ray Server Software (version 4) runs itself on Windows AND enables a direct connection to Windows Terminal Services.
• Linux - we offer Linux as an alternative, another possbile choice, to our customers that utilize the x86 platform. For the rest, we sincerely believe Solaris is a better Linux than Linux.
• Java Desktop System -or JDS is the name of the collection of desktop productivity tools that we offer. Think Mozilla, StarOffice, PDF viewer, Evolution and others here. It is NOT an acronym denoting 'the Linux from Sun': this misunderstanding comes from the days we started offering JDS which at that time was available for the Linux OS only.
• Opensourcing Java - we might some day but it would take more than 2 years from now to do so. Time we need to sort out legal stuff, licensing conflicts etc etc. Sun clearly choose to NOT spend 2 years on that but instead spend resources and time on developing Java 6.
• Solaris - one of our crown-jewels (and the one OS I am absolutely in love with). By opensourcing it we created a win-win: we gain much better insights in what customers actually expect and want from Solaris; customers can see under the hood and do bugfixes themselves. Needless to say, the one spot all of this is happening is opensolaris.org .
• MadHatter - MadHatter was our first attempt to position a desktop based on Linux. In fact, MadHatter was JDS + RedHat Linux. Didn't work, IMHO because the world did not want Yet Another Linux Distribution. Nowadays we offer JDS on both Linux and Solaris.
• SunONE - Originally stood for Sun Open Network Environment, which has evolved into our current Java Enterprise System (JES) offering.
• StarOffice - positioned as a free alternative for Miscrosoft Word and based on OpenOffice
• Ultra Thin Clients - this must refer to our SunRay product. A concept no-one else has until this day, with extremely small, quiet, dumb (videocard only) 'terminals' on the desk and a SunRay server in the datacenter, sized adequately for the number of users and average workloads and providing session migration between desks, offices and even countries!
• Solaris x86 - No, we do NOT sell this anymore. Instead, we give Solaris away for free. Both the x86 and the SPARC version. Just have a look at the Solaris pages on www.sun.com.
• N1 Platform - N1, short for (originally) Network 1 comprises our vision that everything in a datacenter should be seen as a resource, and be managed as such. This means that physical boundaries between ie servers, between storage boxes etc vanish. The whole Datacenter is seen as one big pile of resources: CPUs, memory, diskspace, network capacity. Remember our tagline: The Network is the Computer. The Sun N1 Software hence is a portfolio of products for automating servers and applications life-cycle management, and managing grid services across heterogeneous environments. Look here for more info on our N1 Software Portfolio.

I hope this brief description clears up things a bit.