I have spent the last week swathed in swaddling clothes, diapers, prams, 8 year old super hotty bomb outfits, and questions along the lines of "Do you like my hair?" and "Daddy, how does this dress look?" My daughters (all three of them) are lovely and sweet and not boys. It is wonderful, but, I do have the occasional urge to cover myself in automotive grease and cleanse with gojo.

Anyway, about two weeks ago my Audi started yelling at me about brakes. No big deal, until the ABS light came on and the brake light started flashing maniacally. Oddly it was flashing to the tempo of the Pink Floyd song Money. Yes, everything is expensive to fix on this car. Anyway I started wondering what the problem could be as the ABS light is a totally useless symbol. All it does is tell me to go to the dealership and automatically give them $1000. I hooked up my OBDII reader to see what was going on. Totally useless message of course (rough road). So I scratched my head and tested the brakes. They seemed to be working just fine.

In comes the internet. By reading a number of the Audi forums I get the gist that this is pretty common, involves usually a deffective ABS module and it will run me about $1200 to $1500 to replace. However, someone suggests pulling it myself and sending it to a company for a rebuild. The company offers instructions to pull the module and they ship it in three days. I decide that I would rather replace with a rebuilt module and ship the core back to the rebuild company. $225 and two hours later my car no longer yells at me. NICE!

This experience made me think that as the systems get more complex, it is extremely likely that all the dealerships are doing is replacing the parts on these cars. There is little or no diagnostics (Pull the OBDII code and replace the part) and rather it is much more a replacement culture than a fix culture. Interesting. As long as you have the tools, probably much of the work can be done by the individual again. If you don't have the time or the willingness, you can pay for it. Sounds like another model I know quite well.

So, here it is about 1:45AM MT and I am running on about 4 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours. Mom is doing well, baby is doing well, kids are struggling a bit with the new world order, but all in all very well. Thanks to all of those that sent congratulations, way too many to count reached out and sent me a kind word. It means a tremendous amount to me.

I got to thinking about how much easier things are this time then they were the first time around. I think partly it is because I am older, but, partly it is because I understand the system. In the CS lexicon, there are inputs, outputs, some range of variable checking, and only a few simple interfaces for baby 3.0 (Licensed under CUDDLE by the way. This is a minor modification to CDDL, pronounced the same way). 

Partly this is written tongue-in-cheek, but partly quite seriously. Since I have familiarity with the standardized interfaces for infants, I don't have to relearn everything all over again. The system isn't proprietary (most babies enjoy the same inputs and outputs) and instead of spending my limited time trying to figure out what could possibly be wrong, I simply run through the available options (assuming the systems are happy path of course.) So, the last two days have been pretty easy so far. Of course as the systems gain complexity, there will be discoveries, but for now, a well fed, warm and a dry system seems to equate to relative peace and harmony.

If I wasn't so tired I could come up with a clever convention linking babies to Solaris, but, suffice it to say, Solaris by open sourcing, seeks to minimize the amount of effort required to consume standardized interfaces. As your systems get more complex, you may need help scaling to the enterprise space (don't we all?), but for now, Solaris is a good way to keep your data warm, dry and well fed. If you need to burp your systems, well, we can help with that too.

We met this morning at about 6:30 AM for the Go No go decision. The product boss gave a Go and we decided to launch the new product today, a day early. The release engineers are assisting and the final product is being evaluated by manufacturing. We should have a launch in the next 6 hours or so. Preparing the press release and the go to market strategy now.

Stay tuned for the marketing brochure... 

Occasionally things just work out. I was sitting down to watch a little hockey at about 8PM tonight when my wife wandered down and asked me if maybe the pilot light had gone off on the hot water heater. It has been pretty windy so I figured it was a possibility. I ambled down to look at the hot water heater and started wading through the water that was all over the basement floor. Yes, the pilot had gone out, but, really it was the cracked water heater that was the issue.

 After an hour of dorking about with the old hot water heater I determined that it was well and truly shot and would need to be replaced. My 5 minute job was going to be much more than that all of a sudden.

Oddly, I had a spare hot water heater in the garage (don't ask).  So, I get busy draining the remainder of the old hot water heater, powering the new one down into the basement (all alone) and start looking at what I need to hook it up. Of course, I don't have the right connectors and so I sprint for Home depot. I get there 10 minutes before it closes, I get the parts I need and I race for home.

I move things around, install the new hot water heater in the right spot and I hook things up. Nothing leaks, the gas pilot light works the first time and I bleed the system. I have hot water about 4 hours after I determined that there was a leak and it only cost me $11.

This never happens to me. It always cost $500 and there are always leaks and things to tighten and do over. Except tonight, and frankly, I needed that. Best of all? My wife quite nicely recorded the hockey game and so I can watch a little hockey just before I hit the rack. Nice! A really big bummer just turns into a few hours of work and Hockey delayed is not hockey denied.
 

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." TR

We all have huge flaws as a human beings, for we suffer from that universal failing, being human. I think that I could walk out my front door turn left and give someone fifty cents and get them to come up with a list of failings that are both meritorious in their content and have a certain amount of validity. I think that is nearly true for everyone. Only a couple of people I know are truly perfect, at least in their own minds. It is easy to be critical. It doesn't cost very much to pick someone a part and lots of people want to do it. In fact, if I turn around with a blindfold on, I could probably find fifteen new critics of everything or everyone without looking very hard. The same can be said with coming up with reasons why something wont work. Sure, there is a chance of failure, maybe even a big chance. Everything can (and probably will at some point) fail. Easy to point out how the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly.

However, every once in a while, you find someone that is working hard to advance the ball and that has far more positive things to say. This kind of person looks for reasons to succeed, ways to find the best parts of everybody and strives hard to achieve. Next week Sun loses one of these folks. Joe is off to follow his heart and work with wood. I can't help but wish him the best of luck. He is one of those folks that you literally can't replace. Sure, I can find someone to write code like he can. I can't find his spirit, good nature, and can do attitude. This is a big loss.

Best of luck Joe!

 

I got a question from my mother the other day about the title of my blog. My mother is a retired English teacher and she reads my blog on occasion (much to her chagrin as my grasp of the mechanics of language considerably lags hers). Anyway, she is responsible for my love of language (the way a word rolls of the tongue or fits neatly in a phrase). My title is a bit obscure, unless you know me. So, let me explain the content of my blog title.

First off, I consider my time in the Army, Army National Guard and New Mexico Military institute to be one of the defining periods of my life. Duty to others and country etc... The military is rich with tradition, the cadence of life and an exploration of individual definition. Some have heard of the "Long Gray Line" and it refers to long line of cadets that have attended West Point, the United States Military Academy. It means, that there are those that have come before and there those that will come after. Each has a place and there is value in the continuity of duty, honor and country. Clearly I did not attend the USMA, but my school shares many of the same traditions and is called "The West Point of the West". So, to me, The long purple line represents a play on that same spirit of duty and tradition, but with a twist. We have a duty to our folks and we have a tradition of excellence in engineering. There have many before and there will be many after.

I chose the color purple because the logo at one time looked purple to me. I have since been corrected, and was told rather pointedly that the purple color is blue. However, I call things like I seem them, and to me it looked purple. Hence the purple connection to identify myself a true purple warrior.

And finally, a line is something one writes for a magazine or a newspaper. It is also something that one can deliver at a bar to the stunning looking Irish "Sheila" that I married. Never been a particularly good line deliverer but, I played on the line in football (you know, the great unwashed blokes that got their butt kicked in defense of the quarterback) and that kind of appealed to me. I like things with lots of rich content and deep meaning. 

So there you have it. Not a Da Vinci code mystery, but, rich contextual language none the less.

Every once in a while I get the urge to poke at these test that define me (NOT!). Anyway, accordingly, here are some of the results. What amuses me is that most people would claim I am an extrovert.

I just found out that I am a Slight Dorky Nerd God. Strange.

Years ago I was a contractor at Adaptec. At that time I was responsible for performance analysis on a product called WinStripe, essentially an early implementation of raid 0 for windows boxes. It was a cool job and I got to geek it up with lots and lots of hardware and some wicked fast (for those days) throughput numbers. However, I felt it keenly that I was a contractor and I didn't like it much. I felt like I was missing the secret knock and wanted desperately to be part of the crowd. When I converted, on November  18th, I was very very happy.

About a year ago I had the chance to reconnect with a colleague of mine from Adaptec and she joined my organization as a contractor to help manage my community. Together we launched Storage Stop (our blog about storage goings on), started editing and recording video of the projects we are doing as well as helping with our portal. I came up with the idea to start translating blogs, and  Deirdré came up with cool ideas to fund it. We launched an effort to measure our metrics and run analysis on our communication trafficking and wrote dozens of interesting presentations and storage related blogs. In one short year we helped change the face of our storage communication. Deirdré is responsible for a tectonic shift in the way we communicate and we are much more prolific in terms of messaging and communicating.

Deirdré has (sadly) left my organization to become part of our Business Communications team. I am a bit sad because Deirdré is a phenomenally good communicator and having her in my organization was great. We did a lot of cool things together. On the other hand, this is a larger role for Deirdré and I can foresee great things in her future. Additionally, since I run an engineering organization and not a marketing communications organization, it would have been difficult to convert her to a regular employee. In her new role, conversion was axiomatic. So, I am very happy for Deirdré, she is now a formal Sun employee, and it is great.

Welcome Deirdré (again) and thank you for all your help and efforts. Good luck with your new role and I look forward to working together (again) for many years.

A couple of days ago I received a SCA (Solaris Contributers Agreement) from the guys at Storage Switch. Turns out they want to help us write source for our flagship ST5800 or Honeycomb product. They have a few cool ideas about how we can leap into the future and they want to do it with us in the Open Source space. I could wax eloquent about partnerships and symbiotic relationships and moving the value chain, but, quite frankly, if you read my blog, you have heard it before. How about a different take on the same value statement?

Open source drives value and innovation for our customers. By working closely with people that leverage our value chain, we make it easier for customers to deploy our products. We increase visibility by having talented folks work with each other and turning out cool products. This enables the entire ecosystem, and, at the end of the day, if the customer benefits, because of tightly coupled development teams, we all win.

 Welcome Clark and Andy! We look forward to a profoundly beneficial relationship!

I spent this weekend fixing my John Deere 317, a 30 year old lawn tractor.

It is a bit cranky, but ultimately it goes forward and backward, pushes dirt and snow around, and cuts my grass. It just works (sometimes). I spend a bit of time doing this and that to it, and frankly I have spent more time fixing it then using it. Part of me is frustrated because I like things that just work. Turn it on and it goes. It cuts, pushes, moves, etc. And, when the green machine is working, it does it great. The other part of me, that part that loves working with my hands, solving problems and making things work, enjoys fixing the green machine. (I don't call it the green machine because of the color but rather all the "green" I have to put into it. For those not familiar with American slang, green is another term for money.)

There is something satisfying about a tune up, replacing an accelerator cable, repairing the cutting deck, fixing the brakes, hydraulic hoses and ignition switch, as well as every single tire on the green machine. You might gather that I have done all of that over the last two years. It runs better now, and it gets a bit better every day. All that being said, the allure of walking into the local John Deere dealership and driving out with a brand new machine kind of gets me in that part that is uniquely male. You know, that part of most men that drags knuckles, scratches where it itches and generally thinks that dirt and shooting things is pretty cool. Yes, it it true that my wife doesn't understand the value of a tractor that has a cup holder, can tow a boat (we don't have a boat), dig post holes (no fence posts) or frankly any of that cool stuff. She just shrugs and chalks it up to one of those things she can't understand and doesn't really need to. Anyway, back to my tale. So the tractor I want costs about $12K. At this point I stuff that male part of my brain back into the kennel that it belongs in and I fix the green machine again. There is a trade off between really really cool, and more functionality and features then you could ever use in your life time. Sure, I want to be able to hook up the dozer blade to the tractor, but, what exactly would I doze? (If my wife reads this, ignore the rational part of this post...Danny needs a dozer...)

This is analogous to the storage industry. Sometimes you really really need a dozer that costs $12K. Pushing dirt around is important, and, if you have to mow a golf course, well, you don't want a pair of hedge shears for that. I am a huge believer in getting the tools you need to do your job. (My engineers run on some of the best stuff Sun makes for development systems).  However, other times you just need acres of cheap and deep storage. You need a box that does a few things very very well, and, doesn't cost a fortune. It puts bits on dense storage, costs you exactly enough to meet your needs, but no more, and it just works. Unlike my tractor, you don't need to fix it every ten minutes.

We are building the right level of storage arrays. We offer the high end, wicked fast, storage devices. We also offer starter kits, unique ways of viewing the convergence of compute and storage and well.... Hold on to your hats ladies and gentlemen, now we start some really interesting stuff... This is going to be a great summer, and one that we will look back on in two years and say "There.. right there is when we made life more interesting for storage at Sun..."

 Now, I have a slow hydraulic leak that I need to go clean up.

Last night I spent about two hours listening to music with my wife, kids, and former aupair. We surfed around on Youtube and listened to such venerable oldies as Fine Young Cannibals (She drives me crazy), Ozzy Osbourne (Crazy Train), Nirvana (Smells like teen spirit), Quiet Riot, Def Leopard, Depechemode, New Order, Falco, Bon Jovi, Leonard Cohen and of course Paul Robinson. We also listened to a spattering of new stuff (much of which I couldn't stand) including Scooter (I liked sort of) and the beatbox flute guy(awesome). When I got tired enough I wandered up to bed. On the way up I noticed the time and I was a bit shocked. I was going to bed literally two hours later than I normally do. This got me to thinking about the new model and the new distributions methodology. It used to be that people spent $1000s collecting albums and playing the albums. Even the most extensive collection was limited to a mere smattering of what was available. However in several hours last night I listened to my old favorites, some new favorites and we spent hours talking about and appreciating the various elements of music that even ten years ago would have been impossible (at least in this format). So, whats my point?

My point is pretty straight forward: As the range of connectivity solutions increase and the range and things we care about increases, storage solutions become more important. I have a 140GB hard drive in my AppleTV box, but, realistically, all of the content I watched last night was a function of three things:

Remote storage (and lots of it).

Deep search algorithms.

High bandwidth connectivity.

These solutions are smack dab in the middle of the products we work on. High throughput, cheap and deep storage solutions and persistent archiving and search functionality. Unlike a brain surgeon, I actually get to use the stuff I build and repair... I have a great job.

Thursday my team got a chance to show their work to an army of systems folks in Santa Clara. I really wanted to be there, but since I have another project about ready to deliver, I can't travel right now. Well I could, but the team doing the actual work would find ways to make my life miserable. So, like a good manager I stay home and make sure the team has the appropriate resources and coaching. Hopefully we will deliver on time.

So anyway, we showed the world (at least inside Sun) some of the new technologies that we are working on. The cool thing is that I can talk about it here. I can talk about it here because we are doing it in the open and we have a number of folks participating. Here are some of the essential components associated with world class engineering (Food, Excellent engineers and racks of wicked computers).

Qlogic, our first partner on COMSTAR, put together a poster to show the value chain. Traditionally we would have a bunch of secret squirrel agreements in place and do a lot of board room negotiations. Now we do it together, in the open and we help everyone (engineering, hardware vendors, redshift companies and of course our customers).

With COMSTAR, anyone that wants to participate in COMSTAR and drive the value chain is welcome to. Solaris is a Storage operating system. The power of Solaris coupled with world class partners in an open, feedback intensive value chain drives the next generation of adoption. Together we accomplish so much more than we could if we were just doing it ourselves. Frankly with any of my products and projects, you can participate. You get the value of working with a world class engineering team and you get a chance to influence the next generation of design. Isn't that what it is all about? Four very large customers are either already deployed on COMSTAR or are making plans to deploy. One customer likes it so much they have agreed to purchase 50 Thumpers and a service contract prior to integration. They never would have seen it before it was in the OS if it hadn't been for the power of an open community.

Want to help drive IO for the next generation? Let's hook up...

I sit on the board of directors for the alumni association at one of my alma matters, The University of Colorado. As part of that I occasionally run into folks doing small business start ups and I get a chance to advise them on how to approach things such as venture capital and angel funding.

The other day, one of my colleagues in on my league leading hockey team (19 and 1) and I were discussing his idea. It is in a totally different business space than I normally work in, and yet, I found my self saying some of the same things to him that I say to my teams at work.

* Have a plan for what you want to accomplish

* Know what you are trying to accomplish This actually translated into "How do you get paid" and a discussion into attracting the right kind of talent for your business model. VCs and angels may invest in you (make no mistake, they are investing in you) but, you got to be able to tell them how they get paid.

* Good enough is important. Hal Stern calls this "Close enough for Jazz" in his blog on diminishing returns. I don't have his same eloquence, but, he nails it. We can spend years making the product better. However, at the end of the day you got to get paid. In order to get paid, you got to ship. There is an inflection point between quality and shipping, and, it isn't always easy to discern, but, the ones that win ship early enough to get paid and not so early that their customers hate their product.

* The best way to run a business is to run. By run I mean be nimble, meet the needs of the market, respond with alacrity to your core customers. One of the firms I advise was waxing eloquent about their patent portfolio (all one of them) and were a little stunned when I explained to them that patents were for big companies, not little companies. This is not to dissuade you from seeking a patent. However, a patent is best defended by an army of pit-bull like lawyers that bill at $800 an hour. This will bust a small company in about 10 minutes. If you think that litigating a patent infringement is a good business model, well, you are in a different space than I am and I can't help you. The best defense is to turn the product frequently with innovation, get known as a market leader and then get bought by a company like Crocs. Or, grow so fast and so big that you too can afford an army of trained attack lawyers. Either way, a patent is no real protection until either very bad things happen or you get very big. Run, run fast.

* Show continuity of product or business. I constantly talk to my teams about the factory model for software. Do a few things, very very well, turn it out, do a few more things, turn it out and so on. This regular cadence of releases teaches our customer base that there is continuity to our operation, that they can expect something fruitful in a reasonable period of time ( I like 4 to 6 month intervals) and that we deliver instead of boiling the ocean. The same thing applies to the start up. A one hit wonder is uninteresting. Even the iPOD had a continuity of new product offerings.

* Leverage the value chain. Frankly, there are many things we can do reasonably well and only a few we can do really well. I am convinced I that there are people out there that can sell sand to a crab in the middle of the Sahara. Get them to sell your product. Do what you do very very well. Buy or acquire the rest. (Some folks c all this core competency.)

Anyway, I think it is important to understand the business model and to turn products and software at a sustainable and rational pace.

My thoughts for a lazy Friday afternoon.