Thursday March 20, 2008
First time ...
We all have those moments in life when we just feel a bit ... wired, or awkward. For me, this is typically when I try something new and in front of other people. Sometimes we feel strange when we hear our recorded voice for the first time. The below video represents one of those awkward moments for me. My on-line video debut is the introduction from a recent Birds of a Feather session at the USENIX FAST conference. This was a great time of sharing the vision we have for the OpenSolaris Storage community and hearing what people are wanting from OpenSolaris.
Sit back and laugh as much as I did ... it's only 11 minutes.
For those interested in more videos of Jeff, you can tune in tonight as my son and I present our HomeNAS project. We will be presenting at the Front Range OpenSolaris user group meeting at 6:30pm.
[UPDATE: The video for the HomeNAS: So Simple a 5th Grader can do it, is now live. ]
Posted by Jeff Cheeney [Open Source Storage] ( March 20, 2008 01:27 PM ) Permalink
Monday March 03, 2008
FAST OpenSolaris storage
I'm not used to this ...
This has been a fun week. Spending a few days in San Jose for the USENIX FAST conference has been great. Seeing flowers and greenery is a great change from brown, brown, brown Colorado. The opportunity to hear about some new research and meeting a few new folks is great. But I'm not used to this.... time away from the family and being “on” for so many hours is a bit draining ... I'm happy to be in the airport working on this blog entry :-)
FAST is an interesting conference. A mix of student research papers, industry research and a touch of marketing speak. Then there is the inevitable recruiting. Which is a great indicator of the interest and growth in the storage industry. One has to assume that if there is recruiting there is demand for storage and storage technologies. It is also a great place to see old friends & associates. There was Val, now doing the consulting thing, Stephen at that company we are now in litigation with, Brent at Apple. It was also fun to chat with the guys from Virginia Tech Bioinformatics , a sys-admin from Berkley and the guys from the particle physics lab in Germany. Talking with all of these folks about OpenSolaris, storage and their computing needs was enlightening. The guys proved yet again that there is no single work load, we have a long way to go to meet the needs of the converting Linux developer, and patch management for Solaris is still a pain. There were some rays of light (maybe even flood lights) in these conversations. The work to increase the number of FOSS packages in OpenSolaris is very well received, and new installer ( project Caiman ) is getting great reviews and ZFS is really loved ...
I'll be posting more on my reflections of this conference as I process my thoughts and think about how we can tie all of these pieces together.
Lastly, I also want to thank the crew from Sun for their help and participation in this conference. To Deirdre, Lynn , Spencer , Tim, Colin, Peter, Drew, Aaron , Andres, Mark, THANKS. You all are what makes OpenSolaris such a great platform and Sun a great place to work.
Now off to the airplane and home to the family!
Footnote: Getting home to the family took a bit longer than expected. We had the joy of sitting at the San Jose airport waiting for a part to be send down from SFO. 3 hours of waiting, but I did get home!!!
Posted by Jeff Cheeney [Open Source Storage] ( March 03, 2008 10:42 AM ) Permalink
