Tuesday February 10, 2009

Busy, busy day. Lots of news regarding Sun GlassFish Portfolio in general, and  Enterprise Manager in particular. I will in no way try to keep up with Nazrul on Enterprise Manager blogging :-)

I have spoken with countless customers about GlassFish Enterprise Server over the last 18 months (such as T-Mobile and TravelMuse), and it's no surprise common threads appear, such as cost reduction, avoiding vendor lock-in, and support for the latest standards (sooner). The concerns customers have with products based on open source center primarily around support and the ability to troubleshoot production issues.

Regarding support, GlassFish Enterprise Server subscribers have access to 24x7 support with live call transfer for high priority ("production down") issues. In addition, Platinum support offers a Customer Advocate who understands customer deployments, resulting in faster problem resolution and escalation management. However, a Customer Advocate also acts in a proactive manner via regular meetings to keep up with customer environments and issues, and can work with customers on practices to avoid downtime.

To address concerns with visibility into production deployments from a product perspective, Sun is  introducing Enterprise Manager with GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1 (and GlassFish Portfolio). I'll reiterate Nazrul's coverage of Enterprise Manager, which is a good one-stop shop that covers the improved manageability and observability features.  Of particular importance is the ability to avoid downtime in the first place with various alerts and log file management.  We expect many enterprise customers will have enterprise management tools in place. For these customers, SNMP monitoring support is key. A really helpful feature that is generally JDBC pool management.  JDBC pool management is essentially "auto pilot" for JDBC connection pool optimization. Turn it on and, odds are, you will get better performance with less overhead.

If you get a chance, check out Nazrul's Enterprise Manager post and feel free to give us feedback. We look forward to it!

In case you haven't viewed the Q2FY09 quarterly earnings announcement, both MySQL/Infrastructure software and Niagara-based servers are growing strong. Sun doesn't break down the numbers to specific products, but the revenue shows that a growing number of customers are coming to Sun as they build out their web infrastructure.

As for GlassFish, I go home each day with a smile on my face knowing that GlassFish Enterprise Server is contributing to that growth with many new customers.  Calendar year 2008 delivered roughly 9 million downloads, and over 300,000 registrations. Registration is optional, so we do our best to earn it. Feel free to use the GeoMap to view the growth. While I am continually and pleasantly surprised by these numbers, I can't help but feel we are only getting warmed up as our virtual team - both Sun and non-Sun - continues to grow.

All this being said, we are not resting on our laurels. Nope. Too much on our plate in order to continue earning new customers. We're listening.  What do you like about GlassFish/Sun/community? How can we improve GlassFish/Sun/community?  Feel free to contact me directly, or use the GlassFish user's email alias to provide feedback. Other routes to feedback include the The Aquarium blog, FishCAT (GlassFish Quality community), GlassFish.TV,  Twitter, and the plethora of GlassFish community bloggers (too many to list).