Bob Porras' Blog: Words without the accent...

You don't have to look too hard to see examples of businesses that have been impacted as a result of a change in the business model that they served.  One example that is still clear in my mind is the music industry.  There are many empty record store buildings as a result of how the internet has shifted the business model of distribution, sharing and mindset.  The music industry shift continues to this day, but some artists have gotten in front of the change rather than try to resist.  What is the one thing that drives most change?  I'll give you a hint.  It is the most powerful army in the world.  As I learned in business school, military war is plain awful, economic battle is simply brutal.  The perfect storm is when you have a declining economy and a changing business model that implies commodity.  Looking back at change it is easy to understand what happened to the slide rule, floppy disk drives, cathode ray tubes, drive-ins, the home delivery milkman and the home delivery iceman.

There was a lot of discussion about the Amazon S3 outage last Friday.  Some  folks were quick to jump on the cloud computing is dead wagon.  Their probable cause was left to this new storage/compute paradigm is crazy, see what will happen if you buy into this new  IT economy.  Storage has to be expensive.  Come on, it's the only thing expensive left... man.  Of course only start ups and daring enterprises would use such a service.  Well I disagree.  Having been personally involved in outages with previous companies and relying on 27 years of industry experience, it is true that major outages also occur with proprietary server/storage solutions of yesterday. In fact some pretty severe outages and no vendor is excluded.  Cloud computing is not going to go away.  It is only going to get stronger.  Economics will drive it.  New services economically attractive to businesses, individuals, students, etc. will continue to grow it.

As my Dad use to say: "Lead, don't follow."

I like Coke as my favorite soft drink. If you see me drinking a soft drink it's usually that red can... (not the diet stuff).  Let's take a hugely successful business that serves both tasteful and tasteless liquid for human consumption.  The Coca Cola Company.  Established in 1886, it provides 1.5 billion servings of its products per day with over 2800 different products.  In a very competitive landscape it has managed to maintain demand of its most mature product "Coke" while constantly bringing newer beverages to market such as "Full Throttle."  It is remarkable the beverage industry has convinced consumers to spend money buying bottled water which has become a huge industry. 

The beverage "Coke" has been around for a long time yet consumers have not grown tired with its taste.  In fact The Coca Cola Company in 1985 tried to change the taste and got a negative reaction from consumers.  All companies want to retain their customers as well as acquire new customers.  In other words grow.  While "Coke" is a cash cow throughout the world (it does taste different in China), the Coca Cola Company has done a remarkable job of introducing newer products for growth.  Just about every company with any longevity operates to sustain their core products while introducing new products to maintain and grow their revenue. 

Just as investment banks make varying bets on different types of businesses.   A venture capital investment carries a much higher risk and return than an investment bank who's advisory services guide an established business to divest, acquire, merge, etc..  A key part of strategy for any company is to be able to adapt the mix of established products with new products.  You cannot starve off one for the other or your competition will take advantage.  A plan that can absorb unanticipated changes, conditions and is willing to stay the course only draws investors appeal. 

Last week Dresden Germany hosted the ISC '08 (International Supercomputing Conference) as well as Sun's HPC Conference. It was a busy week for many of us in Dresden.  Plenty of presentations, discussions and information exchange among the HPC community.  Fritz Ferstl and myself had fruitful discussion with Dr. Matsuoka-san of TITech (Tokyo Institute of Technology) regarding Sun Grid Engine's policy for throughput AND priority. I also had the opportunity to have dinner with another group of customers at a dinner hosted by Andy Bechtolsheim. Love talking to customers and listening.  Having discussions with other industry vendors around trends, directions and new announcements certainly makes some topics lively.  I personally find the automotive industry crash simulations for safety fascinating. These simulations are an example of applied HPC for an industry.  More Sun HPC Software was announced last week in Dresden which included:

• Linux Edition 1.0
• Sun Grid Engine 6.2
• Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.0
• Solaris HPC Developer Preview
• Sun Visualization Software 1.1
• Sun xVM Ops Center 1.1 

I then headed to Prague for a few days and visited Sun's development site.  A beautiful city with a lot of history and culture.  I understand now why Albert Einstein lived there and had the opportunity to eat at one of his favorite places.  Prague is one of the centers of Eastern European growth as evidenced by the presence of many U.S. based technology companies.  The busy commuter trains, congested technology parks and many construction sites are all you need to witness.  Here's to Macura, Michal, Martin, Victor, Marcin, Zsigmond, Jana, Lubomir, Alena and Michael.

Dresden and Prague are certainly cities of opportunity.

There has been much talk about open source storage software in the past several months.  It seems that it is generating more interest than open source software in general.  The debates have aligned around 2 basic camps of nonsense and practicality.  One observation is starting to become clear.  It speaks relevance to certain folks.  Usually if something is mere hype people will ignore it.  I've watched something that was previously irrelevant become a lightening rod as of late.  Just as we are aligning for a presidential election here in the U.S. we have alignment around proprietary versus open sourced storage software.  More than mere startups are interested and able to design, build and offer a solution using software that is built from software that is open sourced. Heck you can even build your product on an open sourced code base and charge for it too.  It goes against the traditional grain of what is considered the norm for storage.  There is lots of proprietary storage software out there that comes from open sourced code-- e.g. embedded controllers.   Systems companies who have the knowledge of software, integration, sheer collaboration and understanding their customers are capable of creating a similar picture to the above.  It does go beyond DIY.

In fact if you have the expertise to lead in design trends you may be able to do better.  Take the so called blather around SSDs.  Some argue replacing a spinning drive with a FLASH drive using the traditional disk I/O interface is not worth it.  Maybe they are right.  However if your software was designed to use that SSD as a tertiary cache between the disk and the computational engine that would be different.  Yes maybe even altering as was the case when very large memories (VLM) were introduced in the mid-90s.  VLMs enabled the killer application database because working sets became much bigger.  The semiconductor folks do something similar and refer to the concept as pipelining.  Yes old concepts that get reapplied with newer technologies producing significant results.

So it is merely not just a do it yourself thing.  Click on the picture above an scroll through what the product offers.  An offering from a company who leads rather than follows.  It is probably true too if your company has all the capability of using open source software, hardware design and system integration.  Big companies too... not only startups.  Interesting times...

Another 2 million lines of source code contribution completed to the opensolaris.org community-- 6 months ahead of schedule.  Open HA Cluster is the source code, automated test suite, documentation and community for the Solaris Cluster Framework.  While a few agents and some encumbered code fragments are not being released, you are able to build a fully functional high availability cluster from the source code. With this release, users can develop and customize more complete, complex and sophisticated open-sourced business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. Included as well is integration with key applications such as Apache, Apache Tomcat, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DNS, NFS, Grid Engine, Glassfish, Samba, Kerberos and more. Even better you have the opportunity to contribute, modify, enhance and experiment as part of the community. 

This latest contribution follows the Solaris Cluster Agents in June 2007, the Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition in December 2007 and our most recent May 2008 source code.  Click the blueprint on the left for a simple cluster set up and configuration.

Ian Murdock is doing a keynote at LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin featuring Open HA Cluster, followed by a demo by Eve Kleinknecht.  Listen to Barton George and his podcast with Meenakshi Kaul-Basu about the whole enchilada.  Also a shout out to Thorsten Frueauf, Hartmut Streppel, Nick Solter, Amour Kwok, Jeff Osteen, Ashutosh Tripathi, Bonnie Corwin and the OpenSolaris team.  Last but certainly not least a much appreciated high five to the extended Sun Cluster team... including Keith "he's damn good" White.

The community showed up in full force last week in San Francisco, CA for JavaOne.  To kick things off the CommunityOne day had the OpenSolaris 2008.05 release on center stage.  Lot's of Live CDs were distributed and even more downloads occurred last week.  For those of you who could not attend you can get the image to download and burn a CD by clicking the big grey arrow inside the circle below.

For those of you who do not want to download you can have a CD mailed to you free of charge by clicking here.  The Live CD can be booted on your x86 hardware without requiring a full install on your hard drive unless you wish to do so.  If your not comfortable doing this then you can download and install VirtualBox on your OS running on metal and boot OpenSolaris 2008.05 as a virtual machine.

Lot's of features to experiment with including the new package repository, zfs booting, snapshots, kernel CIFS server, network configurator, data services and a new look and feel.  Keep in mind this OpenSolaris CD comes from the same pedigree as the Solaris that many customers are running their business in the enterprise for scalability (100s of CPUs, 100s of threads), performance and stability. 

Help us make it better with new enhancements, more packages in the repository and your time.  Join OpenSolaris.org and SDN today for free.

A year ago Sun announced its OpenStorage initiative.  OpenSolaris is enabling the open storage revolution with the industry's first open storage software community and it is thriving and growing.  Companies are actively contributing source code as well as building appliances and solutions with this OpenStorage software stack.  This is not a head on battle with proprietary storage vendors.  Rather it is a flank.  OpenStorage  provides customers the advantage of a global community, with all the building blocks they need to accelerate business and market response at 1/10th the cost, with freedom to change vendors. Unlike the competition, Sun remains active in the community, offering the full range of service and support to help you at any point along the path to OpenStorage.  The community is enabled to provide OpenStorage software pre-installed on selected servers and contributed to the community for download.

All community members love to share to the degree that they choose.  That is the beauty... participate actively or maybe just watch for the moment from your vantage point.  It is rewarding to observe the participation through the efforts of others.  From podcasts of enthused individuals destroying disk drives to community members touting the value of this open sourced software-- one point is consistent.  ZFS is a file system that keeps appearing in the news more and more.  For example, end to end data integrity WITHOUT  intelligent hardware RAID controllers using free software on commodity hardware is news. Simon blogging about an open sourced home file server is news.  Fear of the impact of this free technology to some proprietary business models is news.  Seeing what others are doing with this technology is news.  Interest from other companies both large and small on using this file system is news.  Tim Thomas talking about configuring native CIFS in WorkGroup mode on OpenSolaris is news.  When Tim discusses Domain mode that is news as well. Seeing Jim Hughes and his YouTube postings helps makes the news as well. 

OpenStorage is no longer coming.  OpenStorage is here and customers are containing and retiring their proprietary storage. 

Set your storage free...  Get connected.

Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Here is a clip from his last lecture.  Gut wrenching but at the same time some worthy advice.  Make it count...  I certainly do and can relate to him.  ABC News will be showing a program this Wed April 9th, 2008 @ 10pm/9 CST.  Here's to Randy.

When I first viewed this video I was amazed more than my kids.  I'm still in awe with what can be created when you pull various engineering disciplines together.  The mechanics, digital electronics and software enable this machine to perform as an almost living organism.  The gas engine sound is a good clue that you are seeing a machine.  However if you turn the volume down and view at a distance you will think otherwise.  A machine that can be kicked, slip on ice, climb in snow and leap tall bounds and recover from these events certainly speaks artificial intelligence, finite state automaton and advanced research.  The fact that this robot is carrying a heavy payload of over ~100 lbs. (~45 kilos) is impressive.  In college I took courses in AI and state machine theory, but this video has been the best demonstration for me of that theory in practice. This robot was created by Boston Dynamics, a company that specializes in human simulation and robotics.  The machine below was funded in part by DARPA.  Cool stuff indeed.  Makes you think will Sarah Connor and Terminator remain fiction?

Another storage code base has been posted at opensolaris.  This most recent contribution focuses on the area of hierarchical storage management (HSM).  The technology is much more than standard backup.  It addresses automated data management via policies driven by data and metadata.  HSM drives some of the largest data repositories out there in the industry today.  With our open sourcing of SAM-Q we have completed an extremely large complex effort of open sourcing our *entire* storage stack!

This milestone is only the end of the beginning since we have many new open storage projects in process at opensolaris.org. These new storage projects are all being developed out in the open with the community.  Everything from data services, protocols, file systems, compression, encryption, replication, snapshots, drivers and archive software is available to the community.  There is no other comprehensive open sourced storage stack out there in the industry.

However, there are other comprehensive proprietary storage stacks out there that are quite good but you pay a hefty price (premium) for each part of the storage stack.  If you have the time but not the money the opensolaris community may be the place where you can contribute.  The community may also be the place for you if you are trying to establish your business or solution at a revolutionary price point.  In either case pure economics is a driving force. 

You may want to check out my most current read. "Alan Greenspan - The Age of Turbulence"  If you enjoy economics, history and want to ponder the power of the open source movement (aggregate demand )-- this book is a must read.  Alan also gives you some insight into the current market meltdown.

Read what some of the many team members Margaret Hamburger, Ted Pogue and Lynn Rohrer have to say about our latest opensource efforts. The entire team's pace and execution responded to a very aggressive goal set by me ~1 year ago... "Open Source the entire storage stack."  I'm also excited by the code contributions made by partners and vendors to the community.  It is also equally exciting to see customers using the open sourced storage technologies to build their storage products for their businesses. 

We at Sun also have the opportunity to build hybrid storage solutions with the opensolaris storage stack as well.  After all, open source software is in our DNA and we are the largest commercial contributors of open source software in the world.  A big thank you to the entire team.

I've just returned from beautiful Johannesburg, South Africa and Tech Days.  It was a very busy week of interacting with developers and many customers.  Africa is another continent going through rapid change.  The growth opportunities are tremendous and South Africa is another example of the new global economy.  The people and climate are great.  The Pilanesburg National Park is spectacular and beautiful.  At Tech Days in Johannesburg we demonstrated an enterprise open sourced operating system in action on a whitebox.  Matt Ahrens, Jim Hughes, Wyllis Ingersol and Renier Sevenster all got together and installed OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 on the whitebox.  A RAID-Z stripe was created across 8 80GB disk drives that were connected via USB ports.  A MD5 checksum was run on a file that was layed out across all of the 8 drives.  Then Jim took a sledge hammer to 2 disk drives without any data loss.  The data still remained preserved and accessible.   Try doing that with another operating system on a laptop or PC!  In fact view the video below and leave the demolition of hardware for another day.  Checkout for yourself the capability of opensolaris.  Download the Developer Preview 2 here.  If you need a MD5 checksum tool get it here.  If you need a CD burner tool get it here.  Then install your live CD  on your laptop or PC and compare it to what you are running today.  No need to partition or wipe out your hard drive as the system runs off of the CD (Live CD).  I heard strongly in South Africa that open source is a requirement for customers.  Even better if your open source solution is built from a proven enterprise operating system.

I am XAM.  XAM I am.  Sun recently made another open source contribution-- this time in the space of fixed content storage software.  Fixed content storage is growing at an exponential rate.  As an example, stop and imagine how much fixed content data will be generated by the Summer Olympics 2008. Pictures, video, tickets, security data, statistics, invoices, hotel bills, airline reservations, etc, etc. etc.  A massive amount of data that will be stored and preserved digitally for a long time.  Customers depend on Archive Products, even better if they are open.

There is now a fully open source code base contributed to opensolaris.org, java.net and the SNIA XAM TWG.  Read Scott Tracy's perspective. This code base eliminates the need to roll your own digital archive using piece parts (server, RAID HW, database, etc.)  Yet another storage solution built on the equation:

• Open Standards + Open Source = Open Storage

Powerful considering this implementation is not proprietary and uses industry standard APIs. Our contribution to XAM further emphasizes the commitment to eliminate the barriers in the fixed content storage arena. No more closed APIs to a specific vendors hardware or software stack, but rather as an industry standard such as Ethernet. Some vendors are being forced to open their APIs as opensource is having a positive effect for customers.

Code contrbutions can be found at java.net, opensolaris.org and for more info on joing SNIA please go here.

A great start for building your own digital archive appliance with proven enterprise software that is available as an open source code base.  A common theme for some vendors that are leading the way. 

Mårten Mickos the CEO of MySQL hit upon a key trend occurring in the web core which is also known as SAAS, web hosting services,  the internet cloud, etc. . "Some people spend time to save $$$ and some people spend $$$ to save time."  In the open source arena the majority of folks (actually it's a pretty vast majority) are spending the time to save the $$$.  50,000 downloads a day of the most popular open sourced database is an eye opener.  That certainly sounds like a vibrant and active community to me!  People who help develop, enhance, promote, utilize, advocate, lead, govern, market, plan, discuss, etc. There is power in numbers  Are individuals using this database?  Yes in the droves.  Are companies using the database?  Wikipedia, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, SecondLife are using MySQL.  Would banks be interested in this technology alternative?  That is a good question.  Are some enterprise companies experimenting with CentOS today?  The answer is "yes."  Can you purchase commercial grade support on CentOS?  It is probably a barrier for certain application deployments in the enterprise today.  Seems like the potential is there... Commercial grade support from a Fortune 500 company can broaden the reach to new customers. A company that  generates new technology rather than simply gather and glue technology together in a distro can be an advantage as well as an attraction.

Does an open source business model want to shift enterprise customers from spending the time to spending the $$$.  Of course. When those customers are ready to do so on their terms because it is a business decision.  Think of "free" but drop the letter 'r' (for me it's easy since I'm from Boston) and you have "fee" for commercial grade deployment-- which typically means support, various service offerings and SLAs.  If you become "the" largest open source company in the world you drive for new and repeat customers via opportunities not by mouse traps.  Opportunities are generated by downloads, partners, OEMs and direct sales.  While the MySQL acquisition is subject to closing and regulation approvals it is clearly a move that complements nicely an existing software business that is growing.

How much data is currently being stored via this relational database?  I imagine it is many tables of stored data and many more tables of the relations between those tables of stored data.  Can MySQL help drive synergies with storage products and other offerings? 

A big yes.

This is making too much sense.

Few can say that storage is not one very hot topic in the IT sector today.  The internet has created quite a medium for content delivery of podcasts, blogs, webcasts, webinars, etc.  This blog itself is an example.  Storage solutions are abundant, but don't forget that some storage vendors charge you for every neat feature.  Yes you pay for that special hardware that does compression to save storage space.  You also pay for every one of those protocols that you need (iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, etc.) and let's not forget about those important data services for protection (replication, clustering, anti-virus engine, etc.)  Some vendors even charge big money when you grow out of your storage pool and want expansion.  Can you say fork lift upgrade?  Well not all storage vendors want to charge you twice.  As the storage market approaches commodity some of us are getting ahead of the curve.  It is true that all storage companies want to make money... but the difference is leading the way versus fighting against something that will happen anyway.  Even new fast storage hardware will become a commodity as others join with similar offerings. It is important to understand that storage today is heavily reliant on low level software such as device drivers, frameworks and protocols that enable the higher level software in the storage stack to simply work.  If a company can expose and open up the storage stack it has a good possibility to attract not only customers but developers as well... which is what I'll call a community.

At OpenSolaris.org there is a project being done by the community called COMSTAR (Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target).  It is a clever framework which enables protocol plug-ins which speak differnent flavors of storage like Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc.  For me it is analogous to  the old port and class driver model of my youth.  For more info on COMSTAR click here. 

Also see what this community member has to say. Some other notables about the storage plumbing at OpenSolaris.  The COMSTAR effort puts code into the kernel for optimization.  It will improve upon the current iSCSI Target already available and in good use today.

Open sourcing the entire storage stack implies the storage plumbing too.  For example it enables this storage stack to work for you rather than you working to pay for that expensive storage solution.

Remember Sun's OS, middleware, database and infrastructure products have the following in common-- they are models of open sourced software that more and more customers are demanding from all vendors and providers.