Imagine if the configuration and software distribution within your datacenter was as simple as upgrading the firmware on your consumer device. Sun's Project Live* [Live-Star] bridges the simplicity and ease-of-use of the firmware model with the modularity and customizability necessary in multi-purpose, multi-vendor systems.

Sun Labs' Sr. Staff Engineer and Project Live* Principal Investigator, Olaf Manczak, joins Sr. VP of Global Systems Engineering, Hal Stern, to this latest episode of Innovating@Sun.


Manczak and Stern discuss the issues leading to the creation of Project Live Star including:

  • The importance of simplicity and reproducibility of device behaviors – for the end user as well as vendors dealing with product support.
  • Rapidly and repeatedly building out similar “instances” in the datacenter with only minor variation among them.
  • Configuring datacenter servers over time
  • How Live* addresses a datacenter buildout of thousands of machines
  • Modularity
  • Getting the entire stack to work with multiple components from multiple vendors or open source teams
  • Making an underlying operating system look like firmware and packages running on it look like personalization
  • Target audience

Tune in to this latest version of Innovating@Sun to hear about how Project Live*'s new system of software delivery makes it easier to use, more reproducible, and easier to debug – thereby reducing costs in the datacenter. For up-to-date details on Project Live*, visit the Sun Labs site and click on “Projects”.

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