What happens downstream?: Scott Mattoon's blog

Registration for DrupalCon Paris opened this weekend, and already several sponsors have claimed coveted top sponsorship spots for the September 1-5, 2009. Whether or not Sun will sponsor for the 5th time in a row is something I'll be checking into over the coming weeks.

Although the agenda and session schedule for DrupalCon Paris has not yet been posted, there is already some interesting content planned for the event, including full day immersion style training in Commercial Training tracks. Whether or not Sun sponsors this DrupalCon, I plan to make this one my 5th in a row.

In other DrupalCon news, San Francisco is making a bid for North America's DrupalCon in March 2010.

Organizers of DrupalCon DC,  in the lead up to the event, asked Sun and the other event sponsors a few questions about their relationship with Drupal.  The first question was:

How does Sun work with Drupal?

I provided this answer:

There are too many ways in which Sun works with Drupal to list them all here, but some of the highlights are:

• In 2005 Sun donated a server to drupal.org when scaling and performance problems were hampering growth
• Then in 2007 Sun donated another server to further propel the scale up of d.o
  
• Sun has used Drupal in building several important online communities:
• TED Prize winner Architecture for Humanity's Open Architecture Network
• Freshbrain - a technology exploration platform for youth
  
• the Open Office extensions site
  
• the Sun Learning eXchange
  
• Plus many organizations run Drupal on Sun technology
• Employees at Sun have been using Drupal internally for lots of things, including:
• as representative AMP stack environment and workload for lots of benchmarking and performance testing
• to demonstrate certain technologies, both in Sun internal training, and with Sun's customers, e.g., using the Webstack pre-built bundle of AMP and other open source packages for OpenSolaris, Virtualization with Solaris zones, MySQL installation and tuning, and PHP code analysis with DTrace.
  
• Sun has created a NetBeans plugin wizard for developing Drupal modules
• Sun is currently investigating system appliances for data archive and CMS that would bundle Drupal
• Of course, Sun is a large contributor to some of Drupal's most critical underlying open source technologies:
• MySQL AB is a Sun company
• many PostgreSQL core contributors are employed at Sun
  
• many PHP core contributors are employed at Sun
• Sun has contributed more FLOSS code than any other single institution*. (Though, we think Solaris is technically a great choice for Drupal.)
• and let's not forget that Sun VP and inventor of Java, James Gosling, defended Drupal inventor Dries Buytart in his PhD examination at Ghent.
  

Clearly, Sun is deeply connected to the Drupal community in many ways.

All the Q&A from DrupalCon's sponsors will be posted here on the DrupalConDC site.

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* Entry corrected to say Sun has contributed more FLOSS code than any other single institution, not Sun has contributed more code to the Linux kernel than any other single institution (although I think I did read that somewhere, it's not substantiated in this paper).  Thanks to Matt for point that out - it's major difference.

Ordinarily, my Inbox is full of anything but heartwarming emails, but last week I was gratified to receive a photo of four Sun Rays atop health worker desks in Butaro, Rwanda. The photo, sent by Erik Josephson of the Clinton Foundation's HIV/AIDS & Malaria initiative, shows the pilot setup for rural health clinics that former president Bill Clinton envisioned when he made his TED 2007 wish to ...

"... build a sustainable, high quality rural health system for the whole country."

- Bill Clinton, March 2007

Sun provided these Sun Ray 2's and the supporting servers as part of its commitment to support the TED Prize that year. To actually see the Sun gear in situ makes all the planning and logistics and weekly conference calls over the past 18 months suddenly all worthwhile. The site in the photo is one of two pilot locations in which the infrastructure will be tested in live clinical situations over the next month. Pending the results of the pilot, this model infrastructure will be rolled out to an additional 70+ clinics and hospitals across rural Rwanda.

The pilot phase of the project, currently being administered by Partners in Health and The Clinton Foundation is set to begin in the villages of Butaro and Kinoni on Monday. The systems infrastructure, comprised of the Sun Ray 2, Sun Fire X2100 server, and Solaris OS, were selected by the project steering committee to serve up the healthcare worker desktop environment. The selection criteria reflected the goals of the project as well as the relatively austere conditions where the healthcare facilities are located:

• Electricity is scarce and not terribly stable in rural Rwanda, so the Sun Ray 2, which consumes about 4 watts and is an entirely stateless device, is a good fit for the workstation. Attached to each Sun Ray is a low power 15" display which brings the total power consumed by each workstation to less than 25 watts. On the server end, the X2100 is the lowest power server available from Sun. The total electricity demand for the primary IT infrastructure in a typical clinic - 7 workstations (Sun Ray and display), 1 server, 1 network switch - is less than 500 watts.
• These facilities do not have extensive protection from the heat and dust that are common in Rwanda's rural villages, so reliable systems that will hold up to extremes is important. The Sun Fire X2100 is a reliable workhorse with good serviceability. Combine that with the Sun Ray's zero moving parts (except keyboard and mouse) and you have about the most reliable setup possible. Every clinic and hospital will inventory one spare Sun Ray, so if one does fail it's a simple replacement to put that workstation back into service - no installation or configuration required. Just attach it to the network and you're back to treating patients. Spare X2100 servers will be inventoried in Kigale, so a server failure will require that the replacement be dispatched to the facility for replacement.
• Rwanda is a fledgling economy. The ICT infrastructure upon which the healthcare system and other critical social services are built must be sustainable and low cost. Any dependence on proprietary commercial products would effectively impose a tax on growth and leave Rwanda's infrastructure at the mercy of foreign commercial enterprises. So, wherever possible, free and open source products were chosen. The Solaris operating system, the Gnome desktop environment, and the Open Office productivity tools fit the bill, and nicely complement the medical records software to be used in these clinics, OpenMRS.

OpenMRS and Africa's Health Workforce

OpenMRS is an open source application, written in Java, that was conceived by Paul Biondich at the Regenstrief Institute. It is designed expressly to address the need for electronic medical record keeping in the developing world, but also to serve as a framework for building generalized medical informatics systems. The Rwandan government selected OpenMRS as a key component of their healthcare scale up effort.

A few countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Rwanda among them, have set a long range vision for national economic and social advancement. Vision 2020 is Rwanda's development strategy to achieve or even surpass developed world standards for national government, rule of law, education and human resources, infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and agriculture. OpenMRS and the supporting open source and energy efficient technologies from Sun contribute toward the infrastructure as well as the human resource goals of the plan. These tools will help to expand the pool of workers capable of delivering critical forms of healthcare by providing a standard protocol and reference resources to community members and paraprofessionals employed in health worker roles, thereby alleviating dependence on highly trained medical practitioners for routine diagnosis and procedures. Estimates from the development community and the UN indicate it would take more that 20 years for sub-Saharan countries to reach the 2.5 health workers per 1,000 people ratio to be consistent with UN targets, assuming they even had sufficient training capacity to matriculate that many doctors and nurses. Instead, OpenMRS helps to change the equation and make it possible to expand health care services much faster than would be possible in a traditional public health model.

In essence, the four workstations in the photo represent a new model health system, not only for Rwanda, but potentially for many other countries in the developing world.

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Related Reading:

• Can Rwanda's Vision 2020 Succeed? post on WorldChanging.org
• OpenMRS FAQ
• Sun Ray in Health Care (and other Sun Ray success stories)

Today I came across the work of Mike Krieger and Yan Yan Wang at Stanford's HCI Lab in which they studied the efficacy of certain online brainstorming techniques.  Their research focused on comparison of idea generation tools to see if, through tool adaptations, it was possible to increase participation in expanding and improving ideas while overcoming the problems of too many disparate ideas, not enough idea collaboration that are typical of brainstorming on discussion forums.  This very narrow (but valuable) study of brainstorming shows potential for significant improvement in modes of collaboration, so I hope they continue their probe into this area.

Krieger's research into idea generation revealed some great lessons from crowdsourcing endeavors on the Internet which he has shared in these slides posted on Slideshare.

The most valuable and, I think, uniquely insightful advice he gives are the 9 guidelines for when to apply crowdsourcing:

1. When diversity matters
2. Small chunks/ delegate-able actions
3. Easy verification
4. Fun activity, or hidden ambition
5. Better than computers at performing a task
6. Learn from hacks, mods, re-use from crowd
7. Enable novel knowledge discovery 
8. Maintain vision & design consistency
9. Not just about lower costs

I see these tips as not only useful to the aspiring wiki-ist and crowdsourcer, but also to users of Mechanical Turk, which happens to be a tool that was instrumental in Krieger and Wang's Ideas2Ideas study.  I'm looking forward to applying these guidelines and the design principles behind Crowds and Creativity to future crowd sourcing endeavors.

More evidence that Sun's open source strategy is serving Sun's growth objectives came in my Inbox this week.  

The founder of a pre-startup company developing a specialized SaaS offering replied to my cold-contact inquiry about their business:

"We're big users of Solaris - we've standardized on Solaris 10 for our systems, and rely heavily on DTrace and ZFS - it's great that it's all open source (well, free-as-in-beer is probably our primary motivation at this stage)."

Two things about his response are strong validations of Sun's strategy.  First, no one from Sun had any prior business contact with this company, afaik.  Second, he goes on to say,

"...  We'll be considering Sun hardware, and we'll also be thinking about support contracts..."

which is precisely the market behavior Sun is trying to drive with it's open source strategy. 

It would be hard to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of a $15B company's strategy from one such response, but this is not an isolated case.   The frequency and relevance of "pre-company" contact with Sun is sky-rocketing.  These are organizations that are incubating businesses and have yet to spend significant IT dollars.  They're looking to avoid technical debt and brace for break-away growth.  They want to embed efficiency and reliability in their architecture.  They want to get started at the least cost possible.  Sun is redesigning itself to serve these objectives, and it's working.

And today at the CommunityNext conference in L.A., the CEO of Real Time Matrix, Jeff Whitehead, repeated the theme to 200+ entrepreneurs who are launching media companies on the web:

"We started on Linux.  We hit a wall ...  Now we're on Solaris.  We use Sun's Coolthreads servers.  We saw a huge performance gain ... We needed to make this switch to succeed." 

No sooner had I captured that quote, when a message pops up in my Inbox from another startup founder here at CommunityNext:

"... I'm really looking forward to a potential relationship with Sun. Our architecture and technologies certainly seem like a good fit."

Our initial introduction was through a discussion about our open source technologies, specifically NetBeans, OpenSPARC, and OpenSolaris.  He wanted to know if he could run Erlang on these technologies.  Answer: yes, he can.

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More on Sun's Open Source strategy:

• Free to Innovate
• F/OSS from Sun
• European Union study on impact of open source software in the ICT sector - highlights Sun's contribution to open source project (conclusion: more than any other single institution).
  

In his keynote at DrupalCon Boston on March 5 Brian Aker discussed the latest approaches to six problems related to scaling up MySQL:

1. Caching
2. Partitioning
3. Replication
4. Batch Processing
5. Understanding Performance
6. Routing

I had a chance to sit down with Brian after his keynote to ask him questions about a few of these approaches.  Here is the interview:

Brian Aker on Scaling MySQL

Thanks to Vic Germani for producing this audio.

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 Resources:

• Brian's blog
• memcached
• MySQL 5.1 Partitioning
• DRBD
  

Sun's annual Customer Engineering Conference wrapped up yesterday.  Officially, the conference themes were Green Computing and "Redshift" - the Internet growth trajectory that is under-served by Moore's law.  There was plenty of great content on these themes, but the overwhelming message I walked away with after three days was that Sun has finally risen above the Not_Invented_Here syndrome that has plagued it's market growth for years.

Todd Fast said it best in a post There is no chicken. There is no egg:

"To most people at Sun, "community" is a walled garden cut off from the real conversation, a case of we know better, shut up and listen. Sun is hardly alone in holding this attitude, but particularly prone to it because of its technology-centric perspective. From that perspective, community is not something that is self-modifying nor self-sustaining, rather it is something to be moderated, controlled, and ultimately held at arm's length. We talk about gathering community in order to drive usage, but we're actually grasping at a shadow of the thing we should want instead—culture."

Courageous and controversial for a circa August 2007 assessment, but accurate to my mind.  Less than two months and a few tipping-point innovations later it appears that Sun has truly transcended (ascended?) this navel gazing mindset. Phew.

The transcendence was no more evident than in Tim Bray's talk, "Web 2.0: The Nitty Gritty".  He wasted no time getting to the point: Sun underestimated the priority of Time to Market for the Web 2.0 developer.  He cited Time to Market as one of four hot developer issues:

• Scalability
• Time to Market
• Maintainability
• Integration

Of the four, Sun placed disproportionate emphasis on Scalability.  But new scaling models were emerging and acceptance of perpetual beta service levels was increasing, both of which served to disrupt the market dynamics that propelled Sun to precarious heights in 1999 and 2000.  Tim went on to espouse all the advantages and adoption patterns of Ruby on Rails and PHP, which play well in a Time to Market driven business model, while Java was akward for a Test First style of programming.   He then went on to say "SOA is bad," sending gasps through the audience.  But his statements were really not that controversial to this crowd, whose collective experience suggests the developer marketplace will not wait for Sun.  People were smart enough to not take Tim too literally on this latter point, but everyone can make sense of Atom and RSS, while not so for SOA - how many developers have the time or will to wade through WS-* specifications in order to integrate a handful of apps?  

The working definition of Choice for Sun engineers of yore (and I count myself among them,) was, "noun, Any color you want as long as it's Indigo".  Tim bid this notion goodbye brilliantly.

We're getting on with the business of competing on merit and mindshare.  Evidence of transcendence is popping all over the place;  heard on an internal conference call today from a software product lead, "We should not constrain ourselves for religious reasons." 

You want to do Flash, Flex, AJAX, JavaFX.  No problem.  You write code in PHP, Ruby, Java?  No Problem.  You deploy on Linux, Windows, Solaris?  No problem.  Choice is the new mantra at Sun.  There's no more room for NIH fussing anymore.

As Jonathan Schwartz said in his keynote on Tuesday,  "Revenue is a lagging indicator of how well you're driving adoption." Given recent growth in Sun's revenue, especially the double digits in software revenue, I'd say we're finally on track with this adoption thing.  No factor has been more crucial to the upward trend than the embrace of technologies that did not originate at Sun.

A nice 10 minute interview with Cameron Sinclair aired on PBS tonight.  I learn something new every time I hear Cameron speak.

"It's a little known fact," says Cameron "most plastic tents are made in Pakistan ... when the Kashmir earthquake happened, because of the series of natural disasters we faced that year ... they ran out of tents."  Watch the video to find out what was conceived by Pakistanis caught in this desperate situation.

Nancy and I caught up with Cameron two weeks ago at a Pecha Kucha event in SOMA.  He told us that Autodesk is now working with AFH to add Project Freewheel models to the OAN.  Freewheel is the "web ready" export format from Revit and other Autodesk tools.  Revit Architecture is the Building Information Management system that Nancy has been training architects to use recently.  Her experience with a Freewheel 3D model (of my house) seemed to indicate that data rich models are too dense to smoothly manipulate (zoom, rotate).  Given the size and complexity of some of the AFH projects, this could pose a problem when adding DWF files to the OAN.

As Cameron said in the interview, the simple solutions are the important ones.  Maybe 3D orbiting of structural designs in a web page is not so important.

Sun's annual Customer Engineering Conference kicks off today with two themes in which our prized field organization will be immersed for the next three days: Green Computing and "Redshift" - the Internet growth trajectory that is underserved by Moore's law.

I had the privilege to interview Matt Ingenthron last Friday in a prelude to the event, in which we ad lib'ed a short repartee about the relevance of Sun to developers who are doing PHP and Ruby applications, and who are classically building on LAMP.  These developers are a decidely Redshifted bunch and are eminently entitled to the bounty of advantages for Redshifted apps of Solaris, and Sun's SPARC and X64 systems, so we give it to them...

There will plenty of news about Sun's successes in the Redshift ecosystem pouring out of the Nevada desert over the next three days, so stay tuned.

Little ironies in life abound.  I couldn't resist sharing this one, posted to an internal Sun mailing list:

First Solar, Inc. has recently announced 100MW Manufacturing Plant 
Expansion in Malaysia

First Solar currently operates a manufacturing plant in Ohio and is in 
the process of completing a manufacturing plant in Germany...

Wondering whether they use SUN?

Anyone with info, pls do share...

Thanks!

I don't know much about First Solar, Inc., but I can say with confidence that, yes, they do use Sun, and more than the average company.