So, last week was the first time I attended the SVOSUG meeting and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who attended who were not Sun employees. It was great to meet folks in the open source community who are so involved with OpenSolaris.

The CrossBow presentation was pretty well received. There was good interaction between Sunay and the audience including folks on the phone. Overall - positive feedback... We want to hear from *you* as well. Check out the "Open Issues" section of the presentation to help direct the project in terms of APIs, statistics, configuration files, etc.

Also, at the meeting, we announced that early access bits are now available on opensolaris.org. So, check that out on the CrossBow OpenSolaris project page - if you haven't already.

Here are a few photos taken during the evening:

and few more here.

Sunay will be doing a talk on CrossBow at the SVOSUG Meeting *this* Thursday, 24 August.

What: CrossBow, Network Virtualization Technology at SVOSUG
When: Thursday, 24 August 2006
Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm
Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium (upstairs)
Map: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/aland/scasj_dirmap.pdf

Call-in Info:
(Note: This is limited to the first 125 users.)
Toll Free: 866-545-5227
Intnl/pay: 865-673-6950
Conference: 809-64-14

Just in case you missed it, Alan Duboff sent out an announcement (see below) to the OpenSolaris discussion forum: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org with all the details.

Hope to see you there!

- Carol

========================================================

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: SVOSUG - This Thurs, August 24, Sunay Tripathi presents Crossbow 7:30pm SCA03
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 11:34:56 -0700
From: Alan DuBoff
Organization: Solaris x86 Engineering


Hi folks,

After last month's Xen meeting, we're following up with a presentation by Sunay Tripathi, architect of Crossbow, a network virtualization, which greatly improves resource control, performance and network utilization needed to achieve true OS virtualization, utility computing and server consolidation.

I'm sure that other folks from the Crossbow team will show up, such as Kais Belgaied, the tech lead, Michael Lim (presented last year on IP Filters), Eric Cheng, Nicolas Droux, et al...this is yet another talent packed team within Sun who is raising the bar on networking, taking it to the next level.

This is truely amazing and innovative technology, the type of technology that changes the industry. I see Crossbow as taking networking to the next level, just as ZFS does for filesystems, DTrace does for system development, or Zones does for system virtualization. Crossbow is like having Zones for your NIC.

The meeting is back to the 4th Thurs. this month, and we'll be meeting this week on Thursday, August 24th at 7:30pm.

We might be able to get a demo of Xen which was presented last month, but no guarantees yet, you'll need to show up and see if that happens.

We will have a call-in number so that remote folks can hear and be a part of our meeting. Please use the call-in info below. This is limted to the first 125 users.

When: Thursday, August 24, 2006
Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium (upstairs)
What: Crossbow, Network Virtualization Technology
Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm
Map: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/aland/scasj_dirmap.pdf

Call-in Info:

Toll Free: 866-545-5227
Intnl/pay: 865-673-6950
Conference: 809-64-14

--

Alan DuBoff - Sun Microsystems
Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group

Well, it's been a while since my last blog entry. Okay, it's been a *long* while since my last blog entry! So let's get back into it with some *HUGE* news!

The 2006 recipients of the Chairman's Award were announced last Tuesday, 25 April. This award honors the top individuals and/or teams for innovation and is one of the highest levels of recognition at Sun Microsystems. I'd like to congratulate all winners and would especially like to congratulate two teams (the New Boot team and the Nemo team) who I've had the fortunate opportunity to work with. Also worth mentioning, these are the only two teams from Solaris Software who were presented the award this year!

2006 Chairman's Award Recipients

Nemo (aka GLD v3): High-Performance, Feature-Rich, and Easy-to-Use Device Network Driver Framework

(From left to right) Nicolas Droux, Sunay Tripathi, (Scott McNealy), Darrin Johnson, Carol Gayo, Eric Cheng

The Nemo architecture provides the traditional DLPI interface to the network layer services, while providing a high-performance, direct-function, call-based interface. It virtualizes the Data Link layer of the network stack. There is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between network interfaces and devices. This leading-edge technology lays the groundwork for innovative growth in the network stack virtualization and resource control areas.

OpenSolaris: Nemo Chairman's Award

For additional information, check out Project Nemo on OpenSolaris.

Also, special recognition goes to Paul Durrant and Yuzo Watanabe who were part of the original core team.

New Boot
(a.k.a. The New Solaris Bootloader for x86 Platforms)

(From left to right) Jan Setje-Eilers, Shidokht Yadegari, Dana Myers, (Scott McNealy), Shudong Zhou, Vikram Hegde, Jerry Gilliam, David Chieu
Not pictured: Peter Luk, Jongki Suwandi

This team solved a very difficult customer ease-of-use problem by re-architecting the bootstrap subsystem in Solaris; simplifying and improving the boot experience on x86; and by adopting an open source boot loader (GRUB) to avoid using real mode drivers ever again.

As a result, Solaris x86 platforms now boot faster and installations are less complicated. It also co-exists better with other operating system installations on the same machine.

So, in my previous post, I mentioned that there were a lot of exciting and interesting things going on and that a lot of cool things were on the horizon. Well, ch-check it out...

The front page story on sun.com is on Solaris Network Performance - featuring FireEngine!

I work with the Solaris Network Performance engineers and it's pretty exciting to see their work in the spotlight of the company's feature story. I even know the architects, Sunay Tripathi and Brutus Curtis who designed FireEngine! (I wonder if MaryMary would qualify this as a somewhat techno celeb sighting.)

And talk about excitement, take a look at these benchmark results! Solaris 10 souped up with FireEngine is kicking butt!

Solaris 10 OS with Project FireEngine Blazes Past Linux

 
Internal testing on a Sun Fire V20z server with two 2.2-GHz AMD Opteron processors and 6GB of RAM.

Check out the entire feature story - there's definitely some impressive technology coming out of the wonderful world of Solaris Network Performance!

Well, I guess I really should post "something" in my blog. It's been content-free for a few months now, but amusingly enough, at the time of this posting, I've already gotten 254 hits! Will any of you come back now that I've actually posted "something"? (Hhhhmmm... or perhaps it really is just 'bots and crawlers checking out my empty blog? I wonder.)

O-kay, a little about myself... I'm the Program Manager in the NPIO (Network Performance and I/O) Group. I've been at Sun for a little over 5 years and have been an administrator for most of my time here. I started out in the Solaris Operating Systems Group, then worked in Solaris Kernel Resources. After one of the more major reorganizations in Solaris Software, I landed in the Solaris Security Technology Group. Just recently, I transitioned to my current position.

I'm currently working on 2 projects, one is GLDv3, code-named Nemo (which Yuzo and Paul mention in their blogs). The other is the Solaris Boot Re-architecture. These projects will be the main focus of this blog, but I'm sure there will be the occasional personal posting thrown in the mix.

I'm far from technical, but have recently started tutorials on basic computer technology (thanks to my manager Fred Zlotnick). And with Tobin posting tutorials on smf/ Predictive Self Healing on his blog - I may become technical yet. Unlikely, but you never know... I just might gain enough knowledge to be somewhat dangerous! ;)

I'll be blogging about the other aspects of the projects and basically taking you through my experiences of being a program manager at Sun. If you would like more technical view points on things, check out Sunay's blog, Yuzo's blog, and Paul's blog as well as the other SNST (Solaris Networking and Security Technology) blogs. They're truly a talented bunch and are very passionate about their work.

Also, if you'd like more information on any of the projects that the NPIO (or SNST) groups are working on, feel free to ask. If I don't have an answer for you, I can at least point you in the right direction.

In the meantime, check out our blogs - there's a lot of exciting and interesting things going on and a lot of cool things to come...

so stay tuned!... you don't want to miss a thing!