Rob Gingell (a former Sun Fellow and Chief Engineer) once asked me to help put together a white paper on how Sun was “more open than open” which is to say that there are so many companies out there who touted Open Systems, Open Software and Open Standards, for whom their motives weren't on the straight and narrow. I wish that I had had this entry.

“Today we have taken our crown jewels, our flagship piece of software, Solaris and releasing it to the Internet community”

I'm most excited about “what's in there” specifically today's consolidation is the core “OS/Networking” what we're calling our “ON” gate release, which as I have been playing with for a couple of weeks, delivers a very stable environment for most ISP like functions, and is the base for all of the other bundles / packages that “live on top”. And the ancillary developer tools - both Sun's Studio Tools and those from GNU.

Like Red Hat is to Fedora, OpenSolaris provides a community development pool, and Solaris becomes Sun's distribution. For the past months Sun has been seeding this community with pretty large tarballs (~ ) which could be manually built, today we're launching an interactive site, typical to most development programs, the CVS tree will be a managed entity.

And since I know that there are going to be a lot of takers, sorry if the download is a little slow - opening day is always popular.

Have fun ;)

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As a team we were joking around the other day looking for new naming models that could properly reflect the self-managing, self-repairing nature of our Grid environment. And what became very clear was that we needed to create a new term that reflected the higher order policies associated with resource management - like financial/revenue arbitrage.

It’s one thing to talk about automated, lights out management, in which most if not all of the precipitating events are well known, and appropriate reactions coded in scripts. Further, you could allow for cascading events, and policy based (weighted) rules tied to a federating paradigm - btw, this is really starting to really reflect the state of the art here (fair harbour clause). But what happens when you actually bring financial/market driven rules and experiences into the solving of these problems? You get utility value optimizing automation… or the “Free Market Utilimatic” (there's a reason I'm not in branding)

Back in February we (Sun and Archipelago Holdings) described the potential of developing a commodity exchange for more traditional Data Center capabilities: network, compute and storage as they really are beginning to become commodities. We know that they’re commodities because of the competition across specific platforms that Sun and it’s competitors always face: it’s not a battle of speeds, feeds or features, but rather price that differentiates - in fact, that compute products are increasingly interchangeable, has been driven by buyers, our customers who wanted choice. As such, it’s fully appropriate that these commodity elements have a market derived value, and we all know that where there are free markets, there are people who trade in their futures. So if spot commodities and futures both have inherent value, then why cannot we leverage this value information to help us prioritize tasking (distributed scheduling), direct our resources (straight thru provisioning) and even help to plan the “onlining” of capacity (resource planning).

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In a recent Information Week article by Darrell Dunn, he tells of a survey by AFCOM:

This is well and good, customers are seeing the utility in using someone else's capital to run their businesses. The problem is that so long as IBM's David Gelardi continues to say:

We have to ask ourselves, so what's the holdup... could it be IBM's “Customization” business, that sustains complexity within a customer's processes and systems to drive revenue? Where is that customization.... Power vs. x64, AIX vs. Linux (which distribution), and the ever increasing complexity of the Globus Toolkit target?

BTW: is this transparent to you? Also, AFCOM has a really interesting article on the importance of workflow as a utility enabler.

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