Tuesday April 21, 2009

Video: Top 5 Cool Features of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems

A couple of weeks ago, Marc (our producer from the HELDENFunk Podcast) and I sat down and put together a video about the top 5 reasons why the new Sun Storage 7000 systems are so cool. We even "invited" Brendan Gregg to show us his latest trick:

For the next video, I'll try to learn more phrases by heart and look less at the prompter screen for a more natural feel. I apologize for my German accent (some people say it adds credibility :) ). Still, people seem to like the video, at least it has been viewed about 200 times already.

There's a lot of discussion around the Sun Storage 7000, most of it is very positive. In Germany, we like to complain a lot so of course we also hear a lot of constructive criticism. Most of the comments I hear fall into one of the two following categories:

1. The Storage 7000 systems are cool, but I know ZFS/OpenSolaris can do "X" and I really want this to be in the Storage 7000 GUI as well!
   Yes, we know that there are still many features we'd like to see in the Storage 7000 and we're working on making them available. Make sure your Sun contact knows about your wishlist, so she can forward it to our engineers. Please remember that the Storage 7000 systems are meant to be easy-to-use appliances: Taking your "X" feature from ZFS/OpenSolaris and building a GUI around it is a hard thing to do, especially if you want it to work reliably and if you want it to be self-explanatory and self-serviceable. Please be patient, we're most probably working on your favourite features already.

2. The Storage 7000 systems are cool, but I want more control. I want to change the hardware/hack them/take them apart/add more functionality/get them to do exactly what I want, etc.
   Sure, that feature is called "OpenSolaris". Please go to OpenSolaris.org, download the CD, install it on your favourite hardware and off you go!
   But, can I have the GUI, too, maybe as an SDK of some sort?
   No. The Storage 7000 systems are not "just a GUI". They are full-blown appliances which means that they're more than just the hardware and a GUI. A big part of the ease-of-use, stability, performance and predictability of these products is in the way configuration options are selected, tested and yes, limited, as well as a careful consideration of which features to implement at what time and which not. Only then comes the GUI on top, which is tailored to the overall product as a whole. In other words: You wouldn't go to BMW and ask them to give you their dashboard, radio and the lights so you can bolt them onto a Volkswagen, would you?

You see, either you build your own storage machine out of the building blocks you have, and get all the functionality and flexibility you want at the expense of some configuration effort,
or you buy the car as a whole, nice, round, sweet package, so you don't worry about configuration, implementation details, complexity, etc. Asking for anything in between will get you into trouble: Either you'll spend more effort than you want, or you won't get the kind of control you want.

If you understand German, there's some discussion of this topic as well as a great overview of the MySQL future plus a primer on SSDs in the latest episode of the HELDENFunk podcast.

And if you like the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems as much as I do, here are the slides in StarOffice format, as well as in PDF format, so you can tell your colleagues and friends as well.

"Video: Top 5 Cool Features of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-04-21 01:19:31.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
7000 features nas open opensolaris overview storage video zfs
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [5]

Thursday April 16, 2009

Top 3 Cloud Computing Principles

As with every new topic in IT, people are wondering about the same questions: Hype or reality? Didn't we kinda have this before? What's in it for me? What's so special about it? Cloud computing is no exception and I've had the privilege to discuss this topic with a number of very bright people over the last couple of months.

To separate the wheat from the chaff, here are the top three key principles of cloud computing that struck me as making this topic very relevant, interesting and definitely the way of the future:

#1: Abstraction

For decades, IT providers have tried to standardize their operations so they can concentrate on optimizing their IT.

But this is in contrast to what IT developers and users want: They want their special version of Apache, with the newest version of PHP and "sorry, but I can't live without these 5 plugins in exactly that versions".

So much for standardization, and thus we ended up with dozens of different versions of the same services, hundreds of different services that we grew up over time with ("Of course we need the foo service, our company can't live without it! No, we can't re-implement it, that would be too expensive, you'll have to continue operating it!"). This is why compute centers today tend to look like Frankenstein's lab instead of the clean infrastructure we'd really like to have, from an architecture perspective.

Cloud computing has found a way to break out of this: A cloud gives you just a few basic, but well-defined services and that's it. Take it or leave it. "Do you like our simple, RESTful foo interface? Fine, use it!", or: "Oh, you want your own special custom version? Sorry, we don't have it. Go away." It's that simple.

This is obviously good for cloud providers, because they now can optimize the bejeezus out of their infrastructure and provide nice, massive scale, low-cost, simple to administer services, which is every IT provider's dream come true.

The new thing here is that now the developers have realized this is good for them, too (and Amazon's success is a testimony to that effect): They can now use whatever version of their software they want, on whatever OS they want and get as many updates as they want, without having to ask their IT provider.

Granted, now the burden of managing the software falls onto the developer/user, but in the end this is a win-win for both, because both sides know exactly what to expect from the other, the rules are clear, and the interface between provider and developer/user is well-defined. Of course, low service costs to the developer always helps, but we'll get to that later.

So the key point here is that well-defined abstraction layers between clouds and developers/users are the grease that lets both sides operate efficiently and completely independent of each other.

#1.1: Layers of Abstraction in Clouds

There are three layers of abstraction in clouds:

• Application as a Service (AaaS): This is what the end-user gets when they use a service like GMail, DropBox (please make an OpenSolaris version, thanks), the myriads of Facebook apps, SmugMug or even Adobe's online photoshop web service. AaaS services are very popular and there's really no reason to start a new application any other way today.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): The abstraction layer here is some kind of developer environment, but the details of implementation (OS, Hardware, etc.) are completely hidden. You just get a programming language and some APIs/Libraries and off you go. This is what Zembly gives you (check it out and create your own Facebook app in minutes), or the Google App Engine. This is the development model of the future: Develop against the cloud, no need to know the details behind it.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): These are the Amazon S3s, EC2s, etc. and we recently introduced our own version of IaaS as the Sun Cloud (featuring open interfaces and a lot of Sun technology goodness under the hood.) In this model, you get access to a virtual server or virtual storage, treat them like real machines, but the physical details of what machine is in what rack or which disks you use are hidden from you.

Most discussions around clouds center around IaaS, but remember that the basic principle of abstraction applies to the other two as well. Also, many AaaS offerings are either implemented on top of a PaaS or IaaS offerings on someone else's cloud, so we already see a whole ecosystem of cloud components working together in a pyramid like fashion, building on top of each other.

The nice thing about the Sun Cloud here is that it'll open up the abstraction layer. Just like programming environments, file server or web protocols, there's a lot of value in open standards and interfaces. That's what Sun's cloud offering is about, so our "open grease" between cloud providers and developers will enable freedom of choice, better interoperability and bigger, open cloud market for all. Check out "RESTing on the Cloud with Open APIs" for a discussion on the Sun Cloud APIs.

#2: Automation

Again, this may seem like nothing new, because IT operators have tried to automate as much as possible within their datacenters forever. From our own history of Sun MC through N1 and now xVM Ops Center to other people's Tivoli's, OpenView and whathave you, we've seen a lot in data center automation, but none of these went the whole way of providing true one-click setup or tear-down of a complete server over the public internet.

Automation in the cloud means the developer/user is in complete, automatic control over their resources. No human interaction whatsoever, even from a developer/user perspective. Need more servers? Let the load-balancer tell the cloud how many more to provide. No need to wait for someone to unpack and cable your machine, no need to wait for your IT department to find the time to install. Everything is automatic.

Again, this is a win-win for both sides. While full automation reduces cost and complexity for the cloud provider, it puts the developer/user in control. Now you can reduce your time to market for your next rollout because you can do it yourself, fully automatic, and you don't need to call anybody, rely on someone else to set up stuff for you, or wait days until some minor hardware/software installation is completed.

The Sun Cloud brings automation to the next level: With its Virtual Datacenter Technology, you'll be able to automate a full virtual datacenter in the cloud out of standard components, not just individual machines.

#3: Elasticity

In the nineties, people bought large, expensive, scalable servers and waited for them to fill up over time as their companies grew. This was of course highly inefficient because most of the time you didn't use most of your server. After the dot-com bust, people became smarter and started scaling horizontally. That allowed you to add capacity to your datacenter in smaller chunks and on an as-needed basis. But what if you need a lot of capacity on one day (because your startup got Techcrunched), but the next day you're back to humble levels of usage, because it's the weekend or the wrong season or there's a major recession coming up? As an extreme case: What if you ran the Olympics website and the games are just over?

That's when elasticity comes in very handy: You can easily scale up your cloud usage, but you can just as easily scale it down again. One day you have 500 web servers, 50 app servers and 10 database servers, the next day you could easily go back to the old 50:5:2 ratio. And you only pay for what you use, never for what could have been.

On a technical level, elasticity is a direct outcome of automation, our #2 principle outlined above.

But the real invention here is in the business model of cloud providers: By multiplexing their resources over a large number of customers, they can level out differing capacity needs, so that they get good resource utilization on a big scale, no matter how much or little resources individual users actually use. And by giving their customers transparent access to this model, they enable them to take advantage of a fully elastic pay-per-use-no-strings-attached model that makes a cloud service so attractive.

And this is what your traditional hoster never gave you before: Whenever you wanted some service from an old-school hoster, you'd have to sign a contract that looks like a mobile phone contract with lots of fine print and whatnot. It's easy to scale up, but then you have to commit to some usage period (like 24 months) and usually it's hard or downright impossible to scale down the size of the service you got. You could easily get stuck.

Cloud computing changes everything with its "look Ma, I can scale like Google!" model: Everybody with a credit card can operate a large datacenter for whatever time they want (and have credit for), and shut it down whenever they like.

The Sun Cloud will expand the business possibilities of the cloud model: You can choose to be the cloud (and we'll help you build it), you can choose to build the cloud (for others, out of our cloud components), you can build your own cloud (we'll help you build that, too) or you can just use it (the Sun Cloud). Just like we believe in open standards, we also believe in partnering, so no matter what your cloud business model is, Sun can help.

Conclusion

A lot of people discuss a lot of aspects of clouds these days, but to me, it's just the three principles above that really count.

You can use them as a litmus test for clouds: Where's the abstraction layer? Is it open? Is it fully automated? Where's the API? What if I scale down, not up? What's the cost model? If one of the above principles are missing, it's probably not a cloud. If they are there, it's most probably a cloud.

Or you can use these three principles to figure out if your internal IT operations are ready for the cloud: Can you implement your service by exclusively using a cloud API? Would you be able to encapsulate your current service inside a virtual machine, then redeploy elsewhere? How about using a PaaS model for developing your next app? Do you really want to afford your own IT infrastructure if you can just rent it like a taxi? What services would need to be re-implemented, and why? These are all good questions to ask when discussing clouds with colleagues and vendors.

But remember that cloud computing is not going to end hunger, bring world peace and cure cancer, all at once and today: Some services fit the cloud model very well (hint: Everything that looks like a web service also looks like a good candidate), some don't (If it's still on a mainframe, forget it). The answer is almost always a mixture, and it will become more interesting as public and private clouds start to interoperate, much like intranets and the internet interoperate today.

Useful Cloud Resources

There's a lot to learn about clouds and a lot of bright people are blogging about it. Here are a few points to start from:

• Play a bit on Zembly.com. This is a great IDE for web apps, offered as a PaaS in the cloud. Translation: Log in and create your own Facebook/Meebo/iPhone app in your browser in minutes, the social way.
• Check out the Innovating@Sun blog entry on "RESTing on the Cloud with Open APIs" to learn about what Hal Stern and Tim Bray have to say on the Sun Coud's RESTful APIs. Also, the Virtual Datacenter Demo is very impressive, and there are a number of other interesting videos on that site.
• Glenn Brunette has a lot to say about security and clouds, certainly a hot topic. His Immutable Service Containers are the way to go for securely deploying web services in large infrastructures, including clouds.
• If you understand German, there are some excellent German blogs to read. Check out Ralf Zenses' Blog, or Jan Brosowski's (who offers a slightly different definition of cloud principles) or the Serverwolken blog.
• If you prefer to read English, don't despair. Check out the Sun Cloud Blog, or Alka Gupta's Blog with many interesting articles. Marc Hamilton also let's you look at cool hardware building blocks for the cloud as well as HPC clouds.
• There's a great whitepaper from Berkeley University called Above the Clouds, a real must-read. Also, there's a great Cloud Computing Guide on the Sun Cloud page, well worth the small hassle to register for it.
• Finally, if you think you've read enough, then relax by watching a cool video from our partner rPath: Cloud Computing in Plain English.

What are your cloud principles? What aspects of cloud computing are important to you? What important cloud aspect am I missing that would warrant its own principle? Feel free to add your own comment on cloud computing to this post!

"Top 3 Cloud Computing Principles" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-04-15 16:26:24.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
aaas cloud computing datacenter iaas infrastructure it overview paas principles services suncloud
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Thursday March 26, 2009

Cloud Computing in 6 Minutes

Yesterday I visited Sun's European Education & Research Conference in Berlin where my colleague Manuel and I ran a session on Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. Web 2.0 companies have really pioneered the use of cloud computing for their businesses, taking advantage of the low entry cost and high elasticity that clouds provide. These are really good things if you only have a few hundred or so users on one day, then all of a sudden you face hundreds of thousands of them, just because somebody featured your company on Techcrunch or some famous VC twittered about your service. So the two subjects go really well together so our session room was quite packed and we had some good discussions with attendees afterwards.

Sun Campus Ambassadors Alper Celik and Gökhan Dogan from KTH University in Sweden were busy interviewing a lot of people during the conference with their digital camera, and both Manuel and I got our few minutes of YouTube fame with them. Here's Manuel talking about Web 2.0:

And here's yours truly, trying to explain Cloud Computing in about 6 minutes:

Curious about Cloud Computing? Check out the Sun Cloud or start developing Web Services inside the Cloud from the comfort of your web browser the easy way using Zembly.

Alper and Gökhan were really busy, they published a bunch of other interviews on YouTube the very same day. Just search YouTube for "European Education and Research Conference" and you'll find more than a dozen of their interviews.

Gökhan also participated in his university's WaterWell project that used Sun SPOT technology to create a wireless sensor network that monitors water quality. Here's Gökhan explaining his project:

With a generation of students that show this kind of motivation, I'm not really worried about how to come out of this recession :).

"Cloud Computing in 6 Minutes" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-03-26 14:56:54.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
cloud computing conference video web2.0 youtube
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Wednesday March 25, 2009

Think Twice Before Deleting Stuff (Or Better Not at All!)

No, this is not going to be another "Remember to do snapshots" post. I'm also not going to talk about backups. Instead, let's look at some very practical aspects of deleting files.

So, why delete a file? "Trivial", you think, "so I can save space!". Sure, dear reader, but at the expense of what?

Let's stop and think for a minute. Our lives try to center around doing cool, worthwhile, meaningful, useful stuff. Deleting files isn't really cool, nor fun, it is a necessity we're forced to do. Don't you hate it when that dreaded "Your startup disk is almost full" message appears while you're in the middle of downloading new photos from your latest exciting vacation trip?

Actually, the seemingly simple act of deleting is really a challenge: "Will I need this again?", "Wouldn't it be better to archive this instead?", "Last time I was really glad I kept that email from 2 years ago, so why delete this one?". Sometimes I surprise myself thinking a long time before I really press that "ok" button or hit "Enter" after the "rm".

The reality is: Storage is cheap, so why delete stuff in the first place?

To put things in perspective, let's try an ROI analysis of deleting files. Let's say we need about 6 seconds of thinking time before we can decide whether a particular file can really be deleted without regret. Let's also assign some value to our time, say $12 per hour (I hope you're getting paid much more than that, but this is just to keep the numbers simple).

Storage is cheap, and last time I checked, a 1 TB USB hard drive cost about $100 at a major electronics retailer, with prices falling by the hour.

Now, how much space does the act of deleting a file need to free up so it justifies the effort of deciding whether to delete or keep it?

Well, our $12 per hour conveniently breaks down to $0.20 per minute, which allows us to perform 10 delete-it-or-not decisions per minute at $0.02 each. Fine. Deleting seems to be cheap, doesn't it?

Now, for that $0.02 you can buy a 1/5000th of a 1 TB hard drive. Wait a minute, 1TB/5000 still amounts to 200 MB of data per $0.02! That's more than you need to store a 10 minute video, or a full CD of music, compressed at high quality! Or 20 presentations at 10MB each! Not to mention countless emails, source code and other files!

So, unless the file you're pondering is bigger than 200MB, it's not really worth even considering to delete it. I'll call this 200MB boundary the "Destructive Utility Heuristic (DUH)".

The result is therefore: Save your time, buy more harddisk space (or upgrade your old hard drive to a bigger one before it dies) and move on. Life's too precious to waste it on deleting stuff. Create good stuff instead! Only think about deleting stuff if the file in question is bigger than 200MB.

I can hear some "Wait, but!"'s in the audience, ok, one at a time:

• "But I can delete much faster than 6 seconds!"
  No big deal. So you can delete 1 file per second, that's still a threshold of 33MB, more than 5 songs worth or even the biggest practical business presentation or the source code to a major open source project. And harddisks are getting cheaper every day, while your time will become more and more precious as you age. Yes, if you're dead sure that file is useless junk and don't need to think about it, go ahead and delete it, but why did you save it in the first place?

• "But I like my directories to be clean and tidy!"
  Congratulations, that's a good habit! Keeping files organized doesn't mean you need to delete stuff, though. Set up an "Archive" folder somewhere and dump everything you think you may or may not use again there. Use one archive folder for each year if you want. File search technology is pretty advanced these days so you should be able to find your archived files quicker than the time you'd take to decide which ones you'll never want to find again. Then, you can still decide to delete your whole archive from 3 years ago because you never used it, and it will likely make some sense, because its size may be above the destructive utility heuristic, but chances are you won't really care because storage will have become even cheaper after those 3 years so you won't save a big deal, relatively speaking.

• "That still doesn't help me when that damn 'Your startup disk is almost full' message comes!"
  You're right. The point is: It's often hard to sift through data and decide what to keep and what not. That's why we dread deleting stuff and instead wait until that message comes. I'm only offering relief to those that felt that the act of having to delete stuff isn't really rewarding, and it isn't (at least while you're below the DUH). Go buy a bigger harddrive for your laptop, it's really the cost effective option. Use the numbers above to help you justify that towards your finance department.

• "I'm still not convinced. I actually kinda like going through my files and delete them once in a while..."
  Sure, go ahead. Just know that you could use that time to do more productive stuff, such as checking out the Sun cloud, installing OpenSolaris or testing our new Sun OpenStorage products.

• "Wait, aren't you supposed to write about OpenSolaris, ZFS and this stuff anyway?"
  I'm glad you mentioned that :). Actually, OpenSolaris and ZFS make it even easier for you to both not care about deleting stuff while keeping your files organized at the same time. The amazing ZFS auto snapshot SMF service will create snapshots of your data automagically every 15 minutes, so it won't matter whether you delete files or not. You can then choose to either not delete them at all and just move them to some archive, or you can delete whatever you want, without the 6 seconds of thinking (just to keep stuff tidy), knowing that you'll always be able to recover those files with Time Slider later. You could then use zfs send/receive to dump your data incrementally to a file server as a backup mechanism and the hooks are already there to automate this.

See, once you think of it, there's not really a need to delete files at all any more. At least not for mere mortals like us with file sizes that are typically below the destructive utility heuristic of currently 200MB (and rising...) most of the time. Music has already reached the point where a song can be stored at studio quality with lossless compression at manageable file sizes so that kind of data won't see significant growth any more. And photos and videos will soon follow. This means we'll need to care less and less about restricting personal data storage. Instead, we now need to focus more on managing personal storage.

Now there's a completely different problem that'll keep us entertained for some time...

"Think Twice Before Deleting Stuff (Or Better Not at All!)" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-03-25 07:07:19.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
efficiency file management opensolaris productivity roi tip useful zfs
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [3]

Monday March 02, 2009

The Inner Life of ZFS: Cool ZFS On-Disk Block Structure Movies

Pascal Gienger of Konstanz University published a nifty DTrace script that captures ZFS' on-disk block activity and published it on his Southbrain blog.

The cool thing: He animated the data. That's right. Using a Perl script, he draws greener or redder dots depending on whether a particular range of blocks on disk sees more reads or writes. By aggregating data over many hours while doing interesting tasks such as backup, he created a series of very cool animations.

In his first post, he shows us the inner life of a Postfix mail queue as an animated GIF:

Then, he compared the write patterns of UFS vs. ZFS using a MySQL workload to produce a cool MPEG-4 movie.

In his latest ZFS animation work, he shows us 18 hours of a mirrored file server including some backup, night rest and user action (Download MPEG-4 Movie here).

Congratulations, Pascal, this is way cool stuff. You really should upload these to YouTube so people can embed them in their blogs :).

Update: Meanwhile, pascal told me that he uploaded his videos on YouTube already. He has a full playlist full of them. Enjoy!

"The Inner Life of ZFS: Cool ZFS On-Disk Block Structure Movies" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-03-02 03:08:10.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
animation cool dtrace mysql structure video visualization zfs
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Friday February 27, 2009

Munich OpenSolaris User Group Install Fest

Yesterday we had the first Munich OpenSolaris User Group (MUCOSUG) install fest at Munich Technical University's Mathematics and Computer Science Building in the Garching Campus. Many thanks go to Martin Uhl for organizing coffee, meeting room and overall help!

The building is very cool, featuring two giant parabolic slides that go all the way from 3rd floor to the ground floor. Check out some construction pictures here.

We began the meeting with a short presentation on OpenSolaris as a home server (here are the slides, let me know if you want the source). It covers some thoughts on why you need a home server (hints: Photos, multimedia clients, backups, first-hand Solaris experience), where to get some extra software, first steps in ZFS, CIFS server and iSCSI and some useful blogs to follow up with for more good home-server specific content.

Most of the people had OpenSolaris installed already, either on their laptops or inside VirtualBox. So most of the conversation was centered around tips for setting up home server hardware, how to install the VirtualBox guest additions and why, or what the best ways are to integrate VirtualBox networking and exchange files between host and guest.

I learned that sharing the host interface with the Virtual Box guest has become as painless as using NAT with the added benefit of making your guest be a first-class citizen on your network, so that's what I'll try out next. Also, the cost of 32 GB USB sticks has come way down at acceptable speed rates, so I'll try one of them to host my OpenSolaris work environment and free my local harddisk a bit.

All in all, such geek gatherings are always a nice excuse to sit together and chat about the newest in technology, find new ideas and have a beer or two afterwards, so how about organizing your own OpenSolaris Installfest in your neighbourhood now?

Update: The way how to set up CIFS in OpenSolaris turned out to be slightly more complicated. Please check the above slides for an updated list of commands on how to set this up. I forgot to include how to expand /etc/pam.conf and assumed this was automatic. Sorry, must be because I set this up at home a while ago...

"Munich OpenSolaris User Group Install Fest" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-02-27 01:50:08.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
community fest home install mucosug opensolaris server solaris
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Friday February 20, 2009

Challenges and Opportunities 2009

This Wednesday I was invited to speak at "Challenges and Opportunities 2009", an informal, almost barcamp-like gathering of startup companies and other bright and innovative people in the center of Munich. The name is the topic and so the focus was on how to make the best of the current economic situation. Surprisingly, the overall feeling of the conference was quite relaxed, almost cheery, as if the econonmy wasn't really that relevant. Just the right attitude to have, I'd say.

Nicholas MacGowan von Holstein of Twidox.com took the effort of putting this event together, which was a remarkable feat, given that he was in the middle of entering open beta with his startup at the same time. Twidox is a new startup company that offers a platform for the collaborative exchange of high-quality documents. The idea comes from Nicholas' experience during his university days where students would spend a lot of time researching publications and trying to find relevant papers to a certain topic. Twidox lets you both publish and search for documents and helps you make sense out of them through tagging, rating and other mechanisms. Actually, there are quite a few parallels to our own SunSpace document management system and so it was not surprising to see Nicholas and Peter having a great interest in each other's work.

Each presentation was limited to 5-10 minutes which was a good thing to keep the pace going. We heard from Terry Bibra about Yahoo's strategy of openness, Stephan Uhrenbacher from Qype talked about principles they observed when creating their startup, Ingo Dahm from Microsoft highlighted some opportunities that today's technologies offer and Nicholas Kirschner of High-Tech-Gründerfonds offered his insight as a venture capitalist about the good, the bad and the ugly of VCs during difficult times. The ticketing logistics of the event were done through Amiando, a fast growing German startup that provides streamlined ticketing operations to everyone. Felix Haas from Amiando offered his own views as a startup, highlighting flexibility in finding the right business model and pointing out that startups don't necessarily need to go for a multi-million Dollar exit.

My own talk was about "Survival 2.0", inspired by Tim Bray's "The Fear Factor" talk at FOWA 2008 that he also elaborated about in a series of inspiring blog posts. Tim talked to developers, so I mixed in some of my own experience of having gone through the Dot-Com Bubble and made a 5-point list of tips to get you through tough times, that everyone of us can use today. Most, if not all of these tips are just common sense, it's just that we sometimes tend to lose our common sense when the going get's tough...

The fine people at Tiburon-TV have recorded the talk and you can watch a video of "Survival 2.0" here. The slides are available from Twidox as well. It's all in German but if you're interested, I can send you a translated version of the slides so you can use them for your own presentations.

Also, check out the Twitter buzz around this event's #cando09 hashtag. It's quite fascinating how dynamic instant communication has become today...

"Challenges and Opportunities 2009" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-02-20 02:07:25.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
challenges events opportunities presentations startup tips twidox videos web2.0
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Tuesday February 17, 2009

Start Believing in Artists, not the Music Industry

A few months ago, while driving home from the in-laws, we heard Normcast episode 119, a German podcast full of nice little fragments, pieces of music and other fun stuff. In this episode, Norman played Matthew Ebel's song "Everybody Needs a Robot" (lyrics, YouTube video) and, being the geek that I am, I liked it a lot.

I asked Norman whether the song was podsafe, it turned out it was not, so I asked Matt directly for permission to use his song in a podcast. He kindly agreed and so we played it during HELDENFunk episode 22 around September 2008. As a way of saying "Thanks!" I bought Matt's latest album "Goodbye Planet Earth" off of CDBaby.com, a website where independent artists such as Matt can publish their own CDs without the need of a traditional record company.

Later, during an event called "Mission Future", which was part of Ars Electronica 2008, I watched a presentation from Pim Betist about a cool new website called "Sellaband". Sellaband is a crowdfunding website that brings musicians together with their fans (called "Believers") and help them raise real money ($50,000) to record an album in a high-quality studio, with professional producers and market it using a real distribution chain.

Now, the two powers have collied: Matt recently joined Sellaband and he's on his way to financing his next album there!

Why am I telling you all of this? Because this is the biggest shift in the entertainment industry since the introduction of recordable media.

Think of it: Now artists can create their own CDs, all by themselves, from writing the lyrics, writing the music, producing demos, connecting with fans, raising funds, managing production and selling their work, all without a single mention of what was formerly known as "the recording industry". While the RIAA and their likes are still behaving like little kids who have lost their toys, music artists have started to take control over their carreers and simply optimized away unnecessary intermediaries out of the equation.

So how does this work? A little bit like owning stock, but with more fun and better "dividends": The $50,000 budget that is needed to produce an artist's album is split into 5,000 "parts", at $10 each. For as little as $10 (1 part), you can become a "Believer" in an artist that is listed on Sellaband. Being a Believer gives you the right to receive a limited edition of that artist's album, once it is recorded. Think of it: This is cheaper than most regular CDs, so there's nothing to lose here. Actually, this is just where the fun starts: Each part entitles its owner to 0,01% of the album's revenue. So if you have a good "nose" for finding successful artists, you can even get some money back out of your investment! You can own more than one part and the more parts you buy, the nicer the perks become. From "Believer" (1 part) to "Promoter" (2 parts), "Publisher" (5 parts and you start earning publishing revenue), "V.I.P." (10), "Crew" (50), "Music Angel" (100) all the way to "Executive Producer" (1000 parts, free trip to the studio baby!). Check out the full "what's in it for me" list.

Back to Matt: His music is a modern version of songwriter-style piano rock. A little bit like Billy Joel, maybe with some Elton John thrown in, but with a modern twist: He likes to add loops, electronic sounds or samples into his songs to add to the atmosphere without them becoming distracting. The lyrics are insightful, full of life, spirit, humor and a little irony. Check out his bio for a much better description of him and his music.

But Matt is more than that: He is a leading example of how an artist can connect to his audience using Web 2.0: He has his own paid subscription service, sells his music online on iTunes, CDBaby and MySpace, including online merchandise on Spreadshirt.com, he blogs, has over 100 videos on YouTube and you can follow him on Twitter. His concert calendar is online and if you can't make it to one of his shows, you can watch him online on UStream. To me he's simply the Piano Man 2.0.

And now you can enjoy a part of his next album, too! Check out his profile on Sellaband.com and feel free to invest in his work.

BTW, Sellaband is a social network, too: You can check out my profile and add me as your friend there, too. Then we can together check out other great artist and change the way the music industry works, just by Believing in the artists we like.

"Start Believing in Artists, not the Music Industry" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-02-17 00:32:44.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
artists business crowdfunding crowdsourcing industry investing media music riaa sellaband social web2.0
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [5]

Friday January 23, 2009

7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me

I recently got hit by a blogger virus Ponzi scheme meme tradition where you get to write about yourself while blaming others for it (thanks, Tim!). Well, I haven't blogged much about myself and I still owe you, dear reader, an "About me" article, but this blog is meant to be useful, not self-serving so you'll have to do with these seven pieces of useless information for now.

1. I used to be a nomad as a kid. My mom worked for the German department of foreign affairs which usually meant that every 4 years or so we would move to a different country. That's why she met my dad in Santiago de Chile and so the secret of my not so German last name "Gonzalez" is finally revealed. Despite all of that, I was born in Bonn, the former capital of Germany, we moved to Switzerland for a bit, I spent my kindergarten years in Bogotá (Colombia) (my brother was born there in 1975 and he can claim Columbian nationality by birthright, cool). I actually picked up Spanish as my first language with only little German (everybody including the TV was speaking Spanish so why should I have listened to my Mom?). From there we moved to Istanbul (Turkey) where I finally learned German (yep, there's a German school there) but halfway through the term, there was a minor terrorist bomb attack on my elementary school (I hardly noticed, really) so my parents had enough of foreign countries for a while and we moved back to Bonn around 1978. I spent most of my school time in Germany until we moved to Rome (Italy) after grade 9 (1986-ish). After finishing school, I went to Clausthal (Germany) (yes, quite a culture shock) to study computer-science while my parents and my brother continued to Lisbon (Portugal), Bonn (Germany, again), then Barcelona (Spain). Now I've been living in Munich for more than 10 years, so I call this "home" at the moment. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Chile, exploring my roots and I'm sure I'll go there again, someday...
2. As a student, I was CEO of a pub for a year. The pub is called the "Kellerclub" and it still exists :). You know how it goes: Your favourite student pub is actually a nonprofit organization for tax purposes so we could serve beer at the lowest prices in town. Any nonprofit needs to have a board of directors of at least three people and that night in, hmm 1992?, anyway, that night when they had to elect a new board, I volunteered together with two others and strangely noone else volunteered so the three of us got to run the pub for a year (in Germany, a nonprofit board has to have at least three members). While the other two members had to deal with financial bookeeping, booking the bands, etc., I mostly had to deal with legal issues (we got exorbitant high fees for social security for all the bands we booked over the last 5 years to deal with), fundraising (we needed new speakers) and trying to keep the bartenders under control so they don't drink more than they earn or close later than the police would let us. Oh, and keeping the school kids out of the club was always an issue, too... But it was fun and we learned more about real life than what the university could have taught us, especially during night after night of bartendering with all kinds of weird guests.
3. Tim blogged about playing around with mod files in his "7 things" entry, which reminds me of the good old homecomputer times. My first computer was a Dragon 32 which turned out to be a clone of the Radio Shack TRS 80 Color Computer. Back then, it wasn't as popular as the Commodore 64, but it had the better OS (read: More commands in its Basic interpreter). That didn't count much, because the C64 had the better games so I upgraded to a Commodore 128d after a few years. Those were the golden times of the SID sound chip and my friends and I spent hours, days, weeks and months listening to cool video game music (and of course playing those videogames, too) and watching breathtaking demos from the demoscene. Back then, you could know everything about your computer, including machine language, hardware registers (there were no "drivers" back then :) ) and the full specs (and undocumented features) of all of the chips inside your computer. I'd loved to program my own music, but somehow my musical talents were limited, and so I spent my time ripping music from games and figuring out how they worked. Then, the Amiga came and I earned my Amiga 500 by teaching my mom's staff how to use a word processor (they shipped PCs with Microsoft Word to the embassy where she worked, but did only one week of training for everything to a staff that never saw a computer before). The Amiga beat the PC world hands down in every category of coolness from audio to graphics to operating system features (multitasking, baby!) for years and of course its sound capabilities were more advanced (it had a real multi-channel sample player), but the SID had that analog touch that the digital world never could quite replicate that well back then. Just when the Amiga times were over (I owned an Amiga 4000 running NetBSD) and the PC won, I was saved from having to buy my first PC by deciding to play on a Sony Playstation console and working on an Apple Newton instead, which both outclocked all the PCs in my neighborhood by a wide margin :).
4. I still want to create music, but hardly find the time. I've played around with keyboards, but mostly preferred programming music using several software tools, such as Logic Pro. My biggest achievement so far is the intro music to the HELDENFunk podcast which I help create on a regular basis. It's not much, but at it doesn't seem to be bad either. At least noone has decided to replace it with a better tune yet :). I secretly wanted to become a drummer when I went to university, an ambition that was unexpectedly reignited during CEC 2008 when Glenn, Bob (?), Ted and I founded "They call me Ted" while playing Rockband in between CEC lectures. Our "band" reached the CEC 2008 highscore. We didn't win the final round (because none of us knew the song we were supposed to play), but we'll be back in 2009 and I'm now playing drums in Guitar Hero World Tour whenever I find the time as a practice. Back to real music: I'll start playing with Logic Pro again, this time trying to create a full song. And then there's the Korg Kaossilator which seems to be really cool, or perhaps I'll finally learn a real instrument like an electric guitar... Who knows?
5. During university times, I worked at the local cinema as a projectionist. Our projection room (to the right) looked remarkably similar to this photo from the Wikipedia article on projectionists. Back then, a projectionist had to do real work, such as splicing together 6 rolls of film (coming in boxes, no reels) into two reels (about one hour each) and manage the transition from one projector to the next during the show without the audience noticing too much. Of course a film would rip in the middle of the movie more often than not and then you had to run back to the projection room very quickly unless you wanted to spend the rest of the night trying to wind half a mile of film back onto the reel. I still keep a piece of film in my wallet as a lucky charm and occasionally I pull it out to show how the Dolby Pro-Logic, Dolby Digital, DTS and SDDS sound systems work on film. Today, I like tweaking my home cinema to get good audio and video quality and it's sad to see how bad the quality of cinemas have become as they spend less and less in getting image and audio quality right.
6. In the mid nineties, I ran my university's web server www.tu-clausthal.de and in 1997, I got hired by Sun to run the ARD webserver, (ARD is the biggest German public TV network), which back then was sponsored by Sun. I still was a student and I did it as a contractor for Sun, but that gave me a nice topic for my master thesis, a motivation to finish my studies and start working as an SE for Sun in 1998.
7. I like to make up funny, useless words. They just pop into my mind and I end up using them for stuff. Think something like "Gadonga". When my daughter Amanda was born, we said she looked like a cute little "Maus" (mouse in German). Well, the Spanish female diminuitive ending is "-ita", so we often call her now "Mausita". I hope she won't hate me for this when she reaches her teen age :).

Well, I hope this was not too boring, and I now get to tag 7 other people:

• Rolf (@rolfk), who is currently enjoying Wall Street Journal fame,
• Chaosblog (@chaosblog), who recently suffered from a similar food tagging experience,
• Alec (@alecmuffett), who may or may not have done this before already,
• Michael (@migowa), who publishes great photos,
• Alpenglow (hey, you should twitter, too, you know?), who publishes more great photos,
• Wolfgang (@stiefkind), my partner in crime for MUCOSUG and
• Glenn (@gbrunett), the best guitarist I know (at least in Rockband and Guitar Hero :) ).

The rules:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

"7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-01-23 03:16:43.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
chainletter childhood meme personal ponzi scheme travel trivia
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [4]

Wednesday January 14, 2009

How to get Audio to work on OpenSolaris on VirtualBox

My regular working environment on the go or when working from home is, of course, OpenSolaris. I've been using it on an Acer Ferrari Laptop for years now and I can say I'm very happy with it, and that's not just because I work for Sun.

Lately, I tried OpenSolaris on VirtualBox on my private MacBook Pro. This configuration turned out to work better than the native OpenSolaris on my company's Acer Ferrari laptop! Due to the MBP being 2 years newer and it having a dual-core CPU plus 4 GB of RAM, it turned out to be the better machine to host my OpenSolaris work environment.

With one exception: Audio.

Audio isn't enabled in VirtualBox by default in the Mac version and that has already been blogged elsewhere. The solution is simply to enable Audio in VirtualBox settings and select the Intel ICH AC97 soundchip.

Then, OpenSolaris doesn't come with an ICH AC97 audio driver and even the new SUNWaudiohd driver doesn't support it. The solution here is to download the OSS sound drivers from 4Front technologies. So far, so good.

But this didn't work for me: Either the sound would play for a few seconds, then hang, or the sound drivers wouldn't be recognized by GNOME/GStreamer at all, resulting in a crossed-out loudspeaker icon at the top! This is very frustrating if you want to show Brandan's excellent shouting video to an audience and have to switch out of OpenSolaris/VirtualBox back to Mac OS X just for that.

Apparently others suffered from the same annoyance, too, but neither of the solutions I found seemed to help: I installed and uninstalled and reinstalled the OSS drivers a number of times, ran the ossdevlinks script to recreate device links, even installed a newer, experimental version of the SUNaudiohd driver. No luck yet.

Then Frank, a Sun sales person who happens to use OpenSolaris on his laptop as well (Yay! a salesrep using OpenSolaris! Kudos to Frank!) suggested to uninstall the SUNWaudiohd driver, then install the OSS sound driver, which worked for him. It didn't occur to me that uninstalling SUNWaudiohd might be the solution, so I wanted to give it a try.

But, alas "pfexec pkg uninstall SUNaudiohd" didn't work for me either! Apparently there's a dependency between this package and the slim_install package bundle. Again, Google is your friend and it turned out to be a known bug that prevented me from uninstalling SUNWaudiohd. The workaround is simply to "pfexec pkg uninstall slim_install" which is no longer needed after the installation process anyway.

So lo and behold, gone is slim_install, gone is SUNWaudiohd, installed the OSS drivers, logged out and back in and audio works fine now! (Notice: no reboot required).

Here's the sweet and short way to audio goodness on OpenSolaris on VirtualBox:

1. Shutdown your OpenSolaris VirtualBox image if it is running, so you can change it's settings.
2. Activate audio for your OpenSolaris VM in VirtualBox. Select the ICH AC97 Chip. Here's a blog entry that describes the process.
3. Boot your OpenSolaris VirtualBox image.
4. Uninstall the slim_server package: "pfexec pkg uninstall slim_server"
5. Uninstall the SUNWaudiohd driver: "pfexec pkg uninstall SUNWaudiohd"
6. Download the OSS sound driver for OpenSolaris.
7. Install the OSS sound driver: "pfexec pkgadd -d oss-solaris-v4.1-1051-i386.pkg" (Or whatever revision you happened to download).
8. Log out of your desktop and log back in. Sound should work now.

"How to get Audio to work on OpenSolaris on VirtualBox" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-01-14 07:32:19.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
audio drivers howto mac opensolaris solaris sound useful virtualbox
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [9]