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...