Bob's blog

Vegas, Baby!

Welcome to Las Vegas - I'm here for the 2007 CEC where Sun's customer engineers from all over the world gather to meet, learn and have some fun. Yesterday was the first full day of the conference, but my second day in Las Vegas. I had some meetings on Sunday, so I left my house bright and early to get here in time for my afternoon meetings.

Monday was a very full day of content - we heard from our Global Systems Engineering leadership team about where we've been and where we're going. The picture is from a video that at the start of the keynote session. It's just what I thought Hal's avatar would look like - he had to be wearing a NJ Devils jersey. The messages were good - leverage the community, there's a long tail of expertise and interest at Sun - find creative ways to use it.

And a most profound message from Jim, "Rethink 'Stuff!'". We've got some very interesting systems and approaches that demand us to think about how to we do things differently to take advantage of innovation. How does your approach changes with systems based on Niagra chips or a X4500 server/storage or a Blackbox? One of the things that attracted me to Sun was the quality of the people. Over the years, I've been amazed by the talent. Yesterday, was no exception with presentations from Andy Bechtolsheim and Marc Tremblay. The roadmap and features for new systems and SPARC chips is very exciting.

After the keynote, I had a full day of sessions including a cool session on Project Darkstar, our new open source gaming server. Darkstar provides a scalable, flexible platform for online gaming. It's a great idea for companies that would rather spend their time being creative on the games interface than worry about how to scale shards and manage users. In fact, part of the scalability comes from not having to worry about shards and zones. Plus it provides persistance and failover capabilities for the game environment. And, Jeff's Bunny Hunter game demo was awesome.

Lots more yesterday, including a belated Happy Birthday to my co-presenter - Tom! We had an unconference and speed geek session in the evening which led to a well deserved night out.

We're back in session bright and early this morning. Should be another fun day in Vegas!

Posted at 11:59AM Oct 09, 2007 by bs in General  |