I've just returned from a few weeks vacation in Ireland and Scotland, a trip that was meant to be just for vacation but had some work tagged onto the end at the last minute. Instead of flying back to the US through London, we ended up stopping off there for the NC05Q4 launch event where we were announcing the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems based on the Niagara (aka UltraSPARC T1) processor.

We arrived on Sunday night and spent most of Monday sorting out a new suit for me. I'd packed for vacation in Ireland (think cold and wet) and didn't exactly include anything that would have been considered suitable for a business event in London. On a side note, since we ended up near Fleet Street (and my ever suffering wife was being dragged along) we took a short detour to see Temple Church (see Tourist Notes below).

After that it was back to the hotel and I then went out to a dinner with the international press. I always really enjoy these events as they have a broad cross section of press that those of us based in the US rarely get to spend much time with.

Tuesday started off with an analyst breakfast at 7:30am where I was seated next to Vernon Turner of IDC, Vernon is responsible for world-wide research across the server, software, network and services programs for the IT Enterprise at IDC so he talks to a lot of our customers (and competitiors), it's always worthwhile to spend some time with him. Breakfast was followed by press and analyst 1:1s as well as event rehersals and the launch itself. The London event was actually a mirror of the main event which was happening in New York at the same time. After that it was a press conference, more 1:1s and a mixer event which meant that I was finished at 8pm. These events are always a whirlwind as our schedules are packed back to back but there's tremendous value given the sheer number of people we get to talk to in the course of the day.

While I was in London I also had the opportunity to talk to some customers and one in particular stands out, he's the CTO of a major financial services company who was just starting his rollout of Niagara-based systems and has had Opteron boxes in-house for quite some time. He has very high hopes for the UltraSPARC systems as his biggest data center issues are currently around power and cooling (this is something we hear over and over again and exactly what Niagara was designed to help with). I'll be going back there in a few months to see how things are moving along on the SPARC front.

He also had some very interesting comments on Opteron. Compared to equivalent Intel processors CPU-bound applications ran up to *3* times faster and memory bound applications ran up to *1.5* times faster. As a direct result he says his developers love Opteron and he's been seeing significant demand from his customers to deliver solutions based on Solaris on x64-based systems. This is all very good news for Sun.

*Tourist Note* For those of you planning a trip to London, Temple Church is one of the the less well known sites that is definitely worth a visit. It's more popular now since it's mention in The DaVinci Code but the day we went, there were only 4 or 5 other people there. It was originally built in the 1100's and is famous (among other things) for the life-size stone effigies of nine knights from the 13th century. It's literally tucked away in a little side street between Fleet Street and the Thames and is worth taking the time to see.

If you have to travel across the city, the water taxi is also a great option. It just so happened that while I was in London I had an early morning meeting at Canary Wharf and was near the river so I went by water taxi. It's one of the fastest ways to get around during rush hour (assuming you're traveling between two points near the Thames) as well as see some of Londons most famous sites from the water.

Technorati Tags Solaris CoolThreads DaVinci Code UltraSPARC

InfoWorld have just announced their Top 10 Moments in IT for 2005 and they've included the open sourcing of Solaris for "helping fuel a much broader acceptance of open source technology in the enterprise".

You can read more here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/12/19/51NNyearinreview_1.html

Technorati Tags Solaris OpenSolaris

Who would have thought it'd be this hard to keep my blog up to date, I guess I'm just not trying hard enough. The last couple of months have been pretty wild, we've announced and/or released a ton of new products e.g. Postgres for Solaris, ZFS, Xen, Solaris Enterprise System, Niagara-based systems etc etc. So much in fact that it's been hard to keep, well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Since we appear to be heading into a more quiet time here, I'm going to get back on track with posting updates on what we're doing, where and with whom.

We may as well start with some of the good stuff and it doesn't get much better than free iPods. Yes, we have another way for anyone outside of Sun to get a free iPod and it couldn't be easier. Just tell us why you love Solaris, that's it, no catches.

We're really interested in the things people have to say about Solaris 10 but to be honest, if you say something about *any* version of Solaris, including OpenSolaris you have a good chance at being included. The other thing to note is that we're also happy to hear what you don't like, that feedback is always interesting to us.

So get writing, two winners are chosen at random each month.

Technorati Tags Solaris OpenSolaris Postgres ZFS Xen Solaris Enterprise System CoolThreads iPod

But since it's not me, I have to assume that the driver of the Ferrari in this video was a stuntman in training or something. Technorati Tags Ferrari Crash

I managed a brief visit to LinuxWorld in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago and I have to say I was quite impressed with some of the hardware on display there, I was however somewhat surpised at how relatively small the vendor showcase area was.

I really thought it would have been much bigger although that may be partly due to my recent attendance at Java One which has a pretty large hall devoted to vendors. The Sun stand was very busy from what I saw (looking at some of the stands close to ours we did seem to be getting a lot more traffic than a number of other vendors) and I have since heard from other Sun employees that it was very busy all week. Apparently our AMD-based systems have been creating a lot of interest.

Since then things have been a bit hectic, I've just got back from a quick trip to the UK and today, I'm off to Japan to see some customers and partners. One of the customers I met in the UK has some very cool ideas about vendor and system management which I'll distill and post later in the week.

If my calculations are correct, The Register has just done the 25th official review of Solaris 10 and overall I think it's pretty good.

In case you're wondering, we are very serious about making Solaris 10 successful, progress continues on new boot, networking, filesystem and virtualization technologies as well as some really hot systems to run Solaris on. Watch this space.

Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Containers Zones Xen Virtualization Linux DTrace VMWare

Tim has written another piece on Xen which includes an easily missed Solaris Containers related note: "one of the IBM VM technologists stood up and said that Solaris Zones solved the problem of managing multiple OS images really well, and how their customers were asking for it, and how he wished the Linux community could extend projects like vservers to try to solve those problems in a similar way. Since IBM has been working on virtualization technologies for many, many years, and I have a lot of respect for their technology and experience in this area, I took that as quite a compliment to what we built in Solaris 10."

It's refreshing to hear a comment along these lines from an engineer at one of our competitors. Recently it's felt like every week or so there's another vendor sponsored or even vendor written "technical document" comparing Solaris 10 to an offering from one our competitors. Usually they go to great lengths to confuse the reader and explain how their product will have better functionality in a "future release".

The best ones are those that are marked for "internal use only", these wonders of misinformation most often get "left behind" at customer sites. This particular type of document seems to be based on the belief that customers don't actually do any fact checking and generally believe most of what they read. They make for very interesting reading, the attacks on DTrace and Containers always providing some outstanding misdirection, stretching of the truth and basic misleading information.

If you're wondering how we get them (they do say "for internal use only" after all), we sometimes use google, you can occasionally find them with a well refined search, or more frequently, customers just give them to us. This usually happens in conjunction with either a request for a response or a comment to the effect that they don't like being treated like idiots.

Personally, I can quite enjoy a bit of namecalling etc but when it comes to the technical papers, marketing people should be helping their engineering counterparts to focus on improving their products, not writing rubbish that most customers will either ignore or see through.

Chris's Disclaimer Any bad behaviour on my part either in the past or the future cannot be used as evidence against my stance in this blog entry. I'm allowed to take the high ground as our product is better than everyone elses, I know, I have the documents to prove it and I'd share them but they're marked "internal use only" I'm afraid.

*91* of the *Fortune 100* can't be wrong (they're all using Solaris 10). Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Containers Zones Xen Virtualization Google

There's an interesting article up on itjungle this morning. Timothy Prickett Morgan has some estimates on Solaris 10 adoption rates for 2006.

One of the little known projects we've been working on recently is Xen support for Solaris. For the uninitiated, Xen is an Open Source software project that supports running multiple instances of an operating system on a single platform. The good news from our team last week was that we've successfully booted more than one instance of Solaris on a single platform.

While it is still early days, we're making good progress and interestingly, the system referred to in the original "Hello World" was a 2-way Opteron box running Solaris and Linux side-by-side. What this means to our users is that the fourth pillar in our server virtualization strategy is up and running, with any luck we should have a technology preview available in the coming months.

One of the questions this begs is "why are you investing in multiple virtualization technologies that essentially solve the same problem?" and the answer is pretty straight forward, as with many Solaris features it's all about choice.

Server virtualization can have many different meanings depending on a number of different factors, e.g. the problem you're trying to solve, the business your in, platform availability etc. Our belief is that there is no one size fits all answer to the problem and our solutions reflect that.

The four pillars (as I see them) are Hardware Partitioning with Dynamic System Domains, Server Virtualization with Xen, Resource Management with Solaris Resource Manager (unique name huh?) and OS virtualization with Solaris Containers.

I won't go into great detail here but customers can choose the virtualization technology they want based on the problem they're trying to solve, I tend to think of it in terms of a couple simple questions:

*Question 1:* Do you need to run multiple different OS versions on the same platform? If YES go to Question 2, otherwise go to Question 3.

*Question 2:* Do you want the multiple OS versions to be electrically isolated? If YES, choose Dynamic System Domains, if not, go with a Hypervisor technology like Xen or VMWare.

*Question 3:* Do you want to isolate multiple applications and/or users on the same system from one another. If YES, choose Solaris Containers, if not, go with Solaris Resource Manager.

These questions verge on oversimplification but they get to the heart of the problem and provide a good basis for discussing how the technologies can then be used together to provide additional levels of flexibility.

Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Containers Zones Xen Virtualization Dynamic System Domains Solaris Resource Manager VMWare

One of the side effects of working in a company that has as strong an email culture as Sun is that you rarely, if ever, get snail mail. It's so rare that I actually get any mail that it's a bit of an event when I get something actually useful and not just flyers for conferences etc . That made it all the more surprising this morning when I got a letter bearing the return address of a commander in the US Army.

Anyone who's ever met me will be happy to tell you that I don't really fit in the "Army of One" category, and I'm pretty sure that I'm not eligible for any form of draft (not since accidently (almost) sparking an international incident on the Irish border in my youth).

It turns out that when we were running the DTrace Challenge at Java One, our "DTrace Commando" Jarod did some work with a representative of the US army. Based on the recommendations Jarod made within *30 minutes*, they saw their application startup time drop from 20 seconds to 5 seconds, a *75% reduction*.

Unfortunately there's no medal but he did get an official letter of commendation, that's pretty cool, it's just a pity we didn't charge government contractor rates......

Technorati Tags Solaris DTrace USArmy

InfoWorld have just released their list of innovators who they believe are "leading the way with their ingenuity" and on this years list of 29 there are *6* Sun employees.

Congratulations to Bryan Cantrill, Stephen Hahn, Adam Leventhal, Cindi McGuire, Andy Rudoff and Mike Shapiro who were chosen for their work on DTrace and Predictive Self-Healing in Solaris 10.

In the related article, two things of interest stand out for me:

Mike's comment "When you look at Solaris 10, if you were to characterize the innovations that are there, none of them are really changing the programming model for applications, the operating system is empowering people to do something with the software that they already had or the ideas that they already had of how to solve problems". This comment gets right to the core of why these features are so revolutionary, your existing applications can be improved simply by being run on Solaris 10, AND they're guaranteed to work.

The second thing is a statement from the writer of the article, Neill McAllister, "Solaris arguably remains the only source of innovation in the enterprise Unix market". Personally, I think Solaris is one of the few places where *operating system innovation* is happening today. These guys (and the hundreds of others working on Solaris) make it an absolute blast to work in the Solaris team, my job is so much easier than my counterparts at HP, IBM, RedHat etc. Technorati Tags Solaris UNIX DTrace Predictive Self-Healing HP IBM RedHat

Yesterday we announced that there have been over 2 million registered licenses for Solaris 10 distributed since January 31st, for the statistics fans among you, that's over 300,000 licenses a month. What's even more revealing is the platform split, it's roughly one third on SPARC and two thirds on x64/x86.

Add to this the fact that Solaris has consistently shipped on more platforms than any other UNIX operating system (such as AIX and HP-UX) and we have a monstrous installed base that is expanding incredibly quickly. For example, according to IDC, for 2004 the leading worldwide UNIX Operating System in terms of units shipped was Solaris and in the first quarter of 2005? yep, it was Solaris.

When we originally made Solaris available for download, we had no idea of the level of interest we'd see. I was pretty sure it would be significant but you just never know with these things. Add to that the fact that the download went live on the first morning of our annual analysts conference (where we had already told all the attendees that we had just gone live and we'd keep them updated throughout the day), it was just a little bit nerve wracking.

Fortunately, within an hour I got a call to say we'd grossly underestimated the demand and were frantically adding more resources to the download center to keep up. Not only that but someone had already put a DVD they'd burned up on ebay and it was trading at $25. By the end of the first day we had over 70,000 registered licenses distributed and it hasn't really slowed down since.

6 months later as I sit and look at the list of companies that have registered licenses for Solaris 10 it makes for very interesing reading. Virtually the entire Fortune 100 is there with many of them installing hundreds and thousands of copies. The stand out for me is the number of major competitors that made it onto the list, on opening day there was more than one in the top 10, no doubt they were just looking for inspiration...

Technorati Tags Solaris UNIX AIX HP-UX

It has to be said that over the last few years I haven't had much need to practice my system administration skills. It's just too easy when your primary system is a SunRay. All I've really had to do is upgrade my laptop to the latest Solaris release and then add occasional bits and pieces of software. I've never patched my laptop (which is running Solaris) even though I know that's really not a clever thing to do, I could never seem to find the time.

Interestingly enough, if my laptop was running any OS other than Solaris, I'd have been happily patching it regularly, it just seemed to do fine on it's own. This alos seems to be the view shared by many Sun customers, I can't tell you how many times I've spoken to customers who say they still have isloated instances of Solaris 2.4 and 2.5 (or earlier) running somewhere in their environment because "it just works".

Just before the break one of my colleagues pointed me to the Sun Update Connection System Edition Preview, which I installed and have been quite happily using since. While I can't say it makes me a better administrator overall, it certainly makes keeping my system up to date very simple. For the first time in literally years I have a laptop with a completely up-to-date version of Solaris running on it and not only that, I now have the ability to update my other Solaris systems remotely. Will there be no end to my productivity?

I've been primarily using the GUI and have it set up to let me know when updates are available, however, I don't let it automatically install anything. I still want to have some hand in the process but if it keeps working the way it has been recently, I may well set it on fully automatic for at least security patches. Overall I've been very satisfied and from what I hear, most of the other folks trying it seem to agree.

Technorati Tags Solaris SunRay

I'm not sure I'd call this a service but I am back from vacation and slowly getting back into work (it's amazing how much longer it takes to wind up compared to winding down, or maybe thats just me) so I'll be posting more over the coming days.

A lot happens when you've been out for a few weeks, the total number of Solaris 10 registered licenses has been rocketing (more on that later) and there have been Solaris sightings all over the place (at Live 8 and the British Formula 1 Grand Prix in the UK to name just two). It appears that even the folks over at google have started to show a wacky sense of humor.

On a somewhat (although not really) related note this is an interesting article from the BBC on "Moon Trees", it even has a link where you can buy descendants of the originals. It doesn't have much to do with Solaris but it is about trees from the moon and well, how often do you get to talk about that?

Technorati Tags Solaris Live8 F1 MoonTrees

As of last night when the Pavillion at JavaOne closed, we had DTraced 16 applications with 15 of those getting performance increases of between 5% and 280%.

To put this achievement in perspective you really had to be there, some of the challenges we faced were: 1)We had one person doing 95% of the work, including installing the apps, getting them running and doing the DTracing. 2)The pavillion was only open for ~8 hours every day. 3)None of the Sun people involved were Java experts. 4)The majority of the apps had never been run on Solaris before. 5)The booth right next to us subscribed to the "employ an idiot with a loudspeaker to shout about your product once every ten minutes" school of marketing (this might not sound too bad, but after 2 days it starts to get very annoying).

The good news is we had a lot of happy customers and got to show off DTrace in the best possible way - solving real world applications. The applications themselves were surprisingly diverse, everything from a CDMA network interference modeling app to an XML parser and something that was representative of a military app (the customer wasn't allowed to talk about that one).

It was great to see and hear so many Java developers asking about Solaris 10, we handed out literally hundreds of Solaris 10 DVD's and the latest reports from the DTrace presentation going on today indicate that there were more than 900 people in attendance. That's over 10% of the total attendees at JavaOne this year.

Technorati Tags: DTrace JavaOne