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.

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