Saturday March 31, 2007

Solaris, my hometown and the financial capitol of India..

Very eventful...
That's how I can summarize my short trip to Pune aka Oxford of India and the financial capitol of India, Mumbai.

As part of one of the program to showcase latest Sun Technologies to ISVs, there were three Sun ISV meet events. I presented three topics in each.
. Solaris ( overview and latest features )
. Extreme Observability with DTrace
. Solaris Containers and Container Management.

I was looking forward to this trip, as Pune is my hometown and you can't get any better reason than an official trip to fly to your hometown. Also a good way to take a break from the regular office work environment! But I reached Pune at 11.45 in the night, saw the amusing “Pre-paid Auto” board with a fine print “(Post paid)” [ whatever that means ]. But lucky that I had a pickup. After reaching home and spending some time talking to my parents, I had to work on my slides.

The first event at Pune was attended by around 20 representatives, only a couple of them with some Solaris background. I guess I was able to generate sufficient interest there, as that was the main outcome we could expect given the nature and background of the audience.

The second one, a customized event for Sun Gard Pune employees went particularly well. We again had nearly 20 SunGard employees in a training room and many of them had a Solaris hands on experience. Some had Linux background. It was a mix of Sys admins, QA/QE, build engineers and developers. It was highly interactive discussing Solaris 10 related things right from obsoleting shmmax to DTrace capabilities and Solaris Containers.

The previous one was on Apte Road and the Sun Gard office is on Senapati Bapat Road. Unbelievably, despite of travelling on both these roads almost daily during my schooling days, it took me some time to get to both the venues. It seems that staying away for nearly 8 years has turned myself into an outsider there. But the traffic, the roads and the puneri public was pretty much the same.

We started for Mumbai at around 7.00 pm, but it was not before 8.00 I guess that we hit the Pune – Mumbai Express way. I had already generated all that hype about this and the condition of the road thankfully didn't let me down. Those of my colleagues travelling for the first time on this road found it better than any other road they had seen in the past, wishing their desire to come again and drive on it themselves. So just to fulfil my inner most desire, I made them get down at the food mall just before Lonavala, to have arguably the best street side food “Vada pav”. While some of them ate it with apprehensions and some with a lot of excitement and curiosity, I had my usual dose of two of them with a lot of raw green chilly !! Awesome ! I thought why don't distribute a Vada Pav as a gift with every Solaris media kit !! ... just joking, but that's what this “Mumbai's answer to a Burger” does to me.

The journey on the express way was as always fast and luxurious, thanks to the great infrastructure. But we gave away all the gains near Panvel as there was a traffic jam that delayed us by 2 hrs. In the traffic Jam, there were all kinds of conversations going on. One of the frustrated guys was busy talking very loud on his cell phone. He was cursing everyone and everything. His next conversation ( which had made a lot of people around very attentive ) revealed that he and his friends had fixed up a drinks session that night, and given the situation he won't be able to make it. So all those abusive words he was using with every sentence were perfectly justified, I guess. Although I am a teetotaler, I can understand. We finally reached at 00.30 in the night and checked in into our hotel.

The event in Mumbai started with a lukewarm response. However, the biggest takeaway
from there is a nice discussion with Sanjay S who is managing many Sun Sparc systems, and there are
more ordered for his lab. He has been using Solaris 10 for more than 1 year and he is proficient
with Container deployment. He has also seen SunMC but he didn't know much about SCM.
First thing I suggested him is to get all Solaris boxes registered.

I was talking 9 hours within these tow days, and I realized I don't talk that much probably entire month
The rest of the team was going to return to Bangalore, but I had plans to visit Pune again to spend more time with my parents. ( Talk to them for at least 9 minutes when I could talk to strangers for 9 hours ). With an adventurous plan in mind, I went to the Andheri east metro station and boarded the Borivali slow local train. [ I know there aren't enough idiots on earth to take a mumbai local train with 13 kgs of travel kit including a laptop. ] But I just had to do it, to get the real feel of mumbai. At Boriwali station I had to ask for the location from where I would get a luxury bus for Pune. I met this thin and short state police constable on the platform and enquired about the bus terminal. He suggested me to cross the over bridge and take the ST ( State transport ). I said I am looking for a private luxury bus, but he insisted that ST is better. And I though no matter what kind of job you do, if you are sincere, you always tend to evangelize your company's products. Wasn't he doing the same, and didn't I do the same past two days Anyway, I found the bus stop and took a bus to pune.

Overall, it was good, somewhat exhastive ( 9 hrs ! in two days ), and a lot eventful trip...