Monday Nov 10, 2008
The eagerly awaited Sun Storage Series 7000 is finally available. This product is something very special and promises to be a game changer in the storage market.
My personal involvement in the development of this product is...none. I wish I had been involved, but all I contributed was a growing sense of excitement. It started shortly after Solaris 10 was released. All of the big names involved in Dtrace and ZFS were pulled off of their projects to go to work on a special, super-secret project. My own colleague Chandan (best known externally as the developer of the source code browser opengrok) went as well. Poof! All disappeared. All of the rising stars of Sun.
So, over the next couple of years, all we heard were bits and pieces of rumors and the occasional actual information released. The project changed its code name once. Then there was some info that the project was storage related. That it was originally designed to fill a price-point gap in the storage market, but quickly grew to be something much more. That it leveraged ZFS, Dtrace and other cool technologies to completely change the way storage is used and administered. It just got more and more exciting.
And now the wait is over. In the last month or two, the info finally came out in full. And I have to say that it was well worth the wait. It combines all of these technologies to make the administration of your storage to simpler with unprecedented levels of observability (That's the simplification of administration of ZFS combined with observability of Dtrace). It uses the latest advances in storage hardware to get unprecedented cost-performance levels. Truly a product that is a worthy follow on to Solaris 10, and something that has the potential of getting Sun Microsystems technology back on the minds of IT managers everywhere. Just a fantastic job. Congratulations to everybody that helped make this product into a reality.
If you want to find out more about the Sun Storage Series 7000, you can look at the link I gave above, but at a more personal level, you can read the blog entries of the team that made it all possible. Just follow the links available here:http://blogs.sun.com/fishworks/. By the way, that was the name we knew it as at first, "Fishworks". It later became known as "Amber Road". And now it is the "Sun Storage Series 7000". But whatever name it uses, the name does not do it justice. It is just too cool.
Monday Aug 13, 2007
This is delicious.
SCO bought the rights to UNIX from Novell, then sued IBM for violating the copyright on UNIX by copying code from UNIX into Linux. Since this put Linux customers at risk, Sun paid SCO $10 million to secure the rights to the remaining pieces of UNIX that we had not already secured. This allowed Sun to indemnify our customers against any lawsuits. Sun got a lot of flack at the time from the Linux community because this deal put money into the SCO coffers and presumably allowed it to continue to press the lawsuit more forcefully. Microsoft also cut a deal with SCO in a like manner.
So, it turns out that part of the deal SCO had with Novell included a provision that said that Novell gets 95% of all future licensing like this and SCO only gets to keep 5%. But SCO kept all of the money from Sun and Microsoft. Since
this violated the contract, the judge in the lawsuit has ruled that the deal that transferred the rights to SCO in the first place is null and void, so SCO has no standing for the lawsuit.
SCO could now transfer the money and re-instate the contract, but it no longer has enough money to make good on the deal. So it appears that long lawsuit with IBM is over. And it is all because of the same deals that Sun and Microsoft cut with SCO that drew such flamage from the Linux world.
Tuesday Dec 12, 2006
We just received word from Jonathan, there will be no July shutdown this coming year. Getting work done is again more important than accounting!
For the last several years, Sun has shutdown the first week in July with the employees taking mandatory vacation time. This was largely due to the accounting practices of GAAP which accounts outstanding unused vacation time against the companies accounts payable. Now, the actual payment of salaries comes out of the operating budget and is reflected in that section, but since in principle the unused vacation time is a liability the total is deducted from your bottom line. The actual outlay is constant of course, because everybody gets paid for 52 weeks every year out of the operating budget either working or taking vacation time. But by forcing all the employees to take the vacation time it helps the bottom line on paper by reducing the accounts payable.
Now this is all on paper, but there are some real benefits shutting the whole company down. You can forgo heating and electricity consumption and maintenance for the week. But since the company cannot really completely shutdown, the potential benefits are not as great as they might be. On the other hand, you definitely get one week of lost productivity.
For the last several years, Sun has been described as "beleaguered" and "struggling" and Sun's bottom line has mostly been red. In the grand scheme of things, the amount of loss we had per share each year was more important than the lost productivity, hence the forced vacation.
Well, no more. That lost week is now more important to us because of lost revenues, lost opportunities and lost time to market. Accounting fictions are now a thing of the past. Back to reality!
Thursday Nov 16, 2006
Radia Perlman was named a Sun Fellow. That's just above Distinguished Engineer and right below
Techno-God. I think she is qualified for the latter, but it takes some time for the paperwork.
She is perhaps best known for the creation of the Spanning-Tree algorithm that is used in all network bridges and switches, but continues to work on neat and interesting stuff in a department that has nothing (alas) to do with me. Radia is sometimes referred to as "The Mother of the Internet".
Congratulations, Radia!
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My read of the decision (but IANAL) is that the ju...