We shipped our first double-wide Sun MD to a customer this week, I saw it arrived all safe and sound today! Well, by double-wide, we really mean two Sun MD S20s in a row.

Here is a picture of the double-wide leaving the factory showroom:

Just FYI, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that a double-wide Sun MD is more likely to attract tornadoes to the locale. The increased number of tornadoes is only scientifically proven with double-wide mobile homes (not data centers).

... is having a clean truck. Dan sent me this montage of pictures (the originals are in the gallery) showing the effort that goes into keeping the truck and its payload clean throughout the 1,000s of miles of travel.

You may have also wondered, "if I were to get run over by this semi with the Sun MD unit attached to it, what type of truck, exactly, would I be run over by?"

Well, its a Kenworth Model T2000 (no, not a Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 which merely runs over competitive servers). It has a Detroit Diesel Series 60 engine in it with 12.7 L displacement and 500 HPs (as opposed to the SPARC system that has an UltraSPARC T1 processor with up to 32 CoolThreads running).

The engine is Air to Air charged, cooled and turbocharged. It has 6 cylinders in a line that are microprocessor controlled.

It gets 5.5-6.5 Miles / Gallon (6.5 downhill from Denver, 5.5 up to Denver . The weight of the truck alone is 24,000 lbs., with the Sun MD and the trailer it is 62,000 lbs. rolling down the highway.

Thanks Dan!

Have you ever wondered what a Sun MD unit built "in the spirit of" a Sun Fire x4500 (Thumper) would look like? Dan Campbell, who sends me some of the best pictures from the tour, took this interesting shot.

It shouldn't be a secret that I work with the Storage Systems Product Group here within Sun Microsystems. I see every day that the number of storage servers and storage solutions from Sun Microsystems is increasing at an incredible rate. I'm spending more and more time in the lab working with many of these storage solutions, including the most complete Open Source Storage Operating System, OpenSolaris.

The entire Sun Open Storage really resonates with me, and when I combine it with something like the Sun MD, the possibilities seem endless. The whole Open Storage message really boils down to (to me)

• Open Software - transparency in the software that runs your storage is paramount. I don't think the pioneers of one of the most critical technologies in the world would argue that openness is the foundation of their success. That technology is encryption. The most successful encryption and security software is entirely open to inspection by communities of experts. It seems counter-intuitive that open software in the security field works, but this type of openness allows the world to observe the mechanics of what is going on to ensure the soundness. Open storage software platforms like ZFS and the drivers themselves that run our storage systems is a leap forward in ensuring the integrity of our data and can benefit from the same inspection that makes our world secure.
  
• Open Architectures - All of our servers and storage should be able to plug into the most extreme data center architectures, this is the foundation of practices like IT Service Management and the foundation that it is built upon (ITIL). Allow your products to be purchased based on how they fulfill the needs of the services, not on some crazy closed architecture that locks a data center to a vendor's whims.
  
• Open Protocols - Everything from management protocols to data path protocols have to be open to inspection and integration. What value is there in hiding these protocols from prying eyes? And opening them up can only yield innovation. System administrators are an incredibly dynamic and intelligent sector of our population. Their creativity in tackling challenging problems comes from necessity. When you combine a Sun MD unit with a set of servers and storage with which the management protocols (and data path protocols) are open to observation by the System Administrators, the possibilities are endless for innovation on how the administrators can observe and manage the contents of the Sun MD.
  

The Sun MD itself is based on open standards. The shipping container is an ISO standard, the racks are standard and the components within the Sun MD are put together to ensure compliance with local building guidelines. We don't force you into using Sun components within the Sun MD, though with our product portfolio I can't imagine why you wouldn't use them for everything from storage to CPU. If you do choose Sun Servers and Storage, we don't even force you to use one of Sun's Operating Systems...though of course there are great reasons to use them.

You may think I'm way off on a tangent (can you believe my "mentee" actually chose me because I do these sorts of things), I'm not.

Just like Sun MD is all about changing perspectives of "what is a data center"; Open Storage, should have the same effect on you as the Sun MD. In the end, "What is Storage". With an Open Storage portfolio at your fingertips and a data center like Sun MD, what could you do differently that various and sundry other vendors don't allow you to do today because of closed platforms, closed architectures, closed protocols and closed software. Should you trust a platform that you can't inspect?

I spent part of my morning (so far) reading an interesting and objective review of our SunMD program from The Uptime Institute titled New Product Review: Self Contained Computer Room in a Shipping Container from Sun Microsystems.

The review is quite detailed and definitely worthwhile.

Here is an interesting calculation from the paper:
"At full load, the fans in the Sun MD are estimated [...] to consume 1.2 kW for a hourly saving of 21kW. This equates to an annual energy savings of 184,000 kWh or 130 metric tons of CO2 emissions."

Other high points in the paper include a Q/A with the SunMD engineering team that focuses on the cooling aspects of the unit as well as a data center "Tier" rating that the Uptime Institute uses to rate solutions.

On another fun Friday note, our team recently worked with a customer to put a second SunMD unit in place at their site. As usual, when permitted by the customer, we bring a camera along to record significant details during the installation and bringup of the unit. We received permission from the customer to put the pictures up in a more public place so, here is some fun Friday slide time for you!

(I've noticed the new Firefox Beta has layout issues with the code above...I'm trying to figure this out to avoid the big white space you see on top).

Don't forget, we have multiple SunMD units on tour at the moment. In Europe we are in Madrid, Spain Tuesday April 22nd to Friday April 25th.

In the U.S. we are in Pittsburgh, PA on Monday April 21st and Cleveland, OH on Wednesday April 23rd.

As always, check the Registration and Schedule site for details on how to get involved.

Have a great weekend!

Our SunMD unit picked up the Government Computer News (GCN) Best of FOSE award in the "Other" category. FOSE is the largest IT event for Government held each year (what "FOSE" stands for is beyond me, please post a comment if you know).

Why did we win in the "Other" category? Well, there is no "Best Datacenter" category...but next year, here's a clue to the GCN folks, put us up under the Best Server and Best Storage category too...I'll rack up a grid in our SunMD or a set of appliances built with our storage products that will blow away the competition...and it will all be in a nice shipping container with 8 cables hanging out of the side

We did make our swing through the D.C. area. Dan has supplied me with plenty of photos in the gallery including this one from a location near the Pentagon.

In fact, the tours move on with a stop today in Boston, MA and next week's stop in Rochester, NY.

I will leave you with a picture from New York City:

And don't forget...TAX DAY is upon us in the United States!

Have a great weekend.

I ran into the SunMD team (Russ Rinfret, Chuck Perry, Carl Meske) over Sushi the other night. Russ mentioned they were in town doing training on the SunMD units in our Lousville campus and that I should drop by and see what the training is all about.

So, Friday I grabbed my camera and headed over to the campus to see how the training worked. It was a 4 day class where the various teams had hands-on training on every aspect of the SunMD. There were folks from Singapore, Australia, Japan, the United States and India in attendance, all working with live or soon to be live SunMD deployments. All totaled there were about 20 attendees.

The group worked on two SunMD units, one populated with Sun equipment and the other without any equipment in it.

There were also stations positioned around the SunMD units where teams could work in larger spaces on various Field Replaceable Units (FRUs). This particular station was where a team would work on a heat exchanger replacing fans, seeing how the plumbing works and a variety of other tasks that they may be expected to work on in the field (or in the mine as the folks from Japan may be expected to do).

The 4 days were packed with tips from the experts with Russ teaching about the FRUs, Carl teaching about the IMS (Integrated Management Server) and Chuck teaching about the EMS (Environmental Management System)...speaking of which, here is a shot of the EMS and IMS working together to ensure that the environment (heat, humidity, doors, drains, etc...) is correctly monitored. For those of you who think I just blog...yes, I worked for a while with Carl, Roger and Vanessa on the IMS.

Notice the reading on the front, 22.1 degrees Celsius (about 72 degrees Farenheit). When you go into the main corridor of the running unit, it is much warmer since the cool air flows around the SunMD racks and not through the center.

I also spent some time talking to and listening to the students (not as much as I would have hoped, but I'll drop in on the next class as well now that I know the classes will be offered more often as the units get deployed). One of the teams (including Yukio Kitano (Project Manager) and Mitsuaki Ohno (Support Engineer)) was from the Japanese project that is setting up SunMD in an old coal mine in Japan. They are starting with two as a prototype and may grow well beyond that.

The goal for the project is to get up to 30 SunMD units running unattended. The deployment will start with engineers and living quarters in the coal mine, but will migrate towards unattended operation (as it should be).

I stayed for the feedback session, all in all it sounds like a great class. Now I just have to wait for the next class and maybe find an excuse to attend end-to-end. I have to say I'm impressed with the shift of the box from internal project, through a stellar sales and marketing turn and into practical deployments. There are SunMD units going into virtually every corner of the globe (more on that another day).

I mentioned briefly that the SunMD unit at CeBIT was hooked up to solar-power. Ingo Frobenius, the Sun Engineer involved in the effort, provided me with more details about the solar installation.

The solar array was about 65 square meters providing 10kW of power. The normal generator used with the SunMD truck was replaced with a transformer and the unit was also attached to the power grid for when the solar panels were not producing power (which happened during the first day of snow .

Its true that 10kW is not going to power a complete SunMD unit. The average rack has a 12.5kW power supply (though if you fill the rack with 4 Sun Blade 6000s, you will need 25kW power supplies with your rack). But keep in mind, many of our warehouses have far more than 65 square meters of space to put solar panels. Next time you are flying over a warehouse region of a city, just look at all of the rooftops that face up towards the sky, there is more than enough space to power a few fully-equipped SunMDs. In fact, some customers estimated the roof-space of their warehouses at about 1000 square meters (enough power for the SunMD and the chiller).

In Germany (home of CeBIT), solar energy is sponsored by the government in many regions, helping make solar energy a reasonable proposition for powering SunMD.

I have to give a "shout out" to all of the companies that participated in the demonstration (in addition to us, Sun Microsystems, with the SunMD):

• Ersol - produced the solar cells
  
• GES - takes the solar cells and builds the solar panels
  
• ALTEC - producing aluminum frames for mounting solar panels
  
• Intel - Rockin' Processors in Sun Servers
  

Go Green!

Ingo, thanks for all of the details!

Hanover, Germany hosted CeBIT and the 495,000 attendees that made there way through exhibitions and the entire conference.

Continuing the eco-friendly theme of SunMD stops, the CeBIT installation had the power generator on the semi replaced with a transformer that attached to Solar power. Yupp, a Solar-powered SunMD unit!

The first day of CeBIT (March 4th) featured a little snow and time a Breakfast TV segment. The local and national news carried a second spot filmed on Thursday.

Companies from cars (Volkswagon) to planes (Lufthansa) stopped by to see SunMD.

SunSpots continue to be a huge draw to Sun's demonstrations (despite their tiny stature). The coupling of SunMD and SunSpots are definitely a 1-2 punch. Keep in mind the SunSpot developer kits are available and are, of course, open source.