Blanchard's Blog

DATE & LOCATION    
    
Wednesday April 18th
6-9PM
Sun Microsystems
Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room
5300 Riata Park Court
Austin, TX 78727

Please join us for the second meeting of the Austin Sun Users Group.
This is a great opportunity to network with your peers in the Austin
area.  You'll also learn more about the hot, new Solaris 10 ZFS file
system.  We always welcome your input regarding topics and speakers.  If
you'd like to become involved in ongoing planning, please consider
becoming a board member.  More details on the board of directors will be
provided at a later date.

Thanks to Lumenate for sponsoring this meeting.

AGENDA

06:00 - 7:00 pm – Registration, Pizza & Drinks, Networking
07:00 - 8:30 pm – Presentation: Solaris 10 ZFS Deep Dive
08:30 - 9:00 pm – Q&A, Networking


FEATURED SPEAKER    

Jeff Blanchard
Systems Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Please help us plan for your attendance by registering today by clicking here.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email austinsug@austinsug.org

On Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 on the University of Texas campus, the Austin Sun Users Group was born.  All of the photos are compliments of Travis Campbell from AMD.  Thanks Travis!  Travis wrote about our meeting at the LOPSA blog.

I'm the bald guy looking down at the paper and Bob Netherton (our presenter) is on my right.  Based on the look on my face, it looks like I hadn't had enough caffeine yet. :^) We had a great time eating pizza off of paper towels (yours truly forgot to get plates), learning more about the new features in Solaris 10 11/06 and discussing logistics for the group.

Originally, we were going to use the ASUG acronym for the group.  However, someone pointed out that the Austin SAS Users Group already uses it so we'll have to come up with a different one.  If you have a good idea, shoot me an email at jeff.blanchard@sun.com. 

We made lots of decisions regarding the group.  Here's a summary:

• We will meet from 6-9pm on the 3rd Wednesday of every other month. Since our first meeting was in February, that puts the next one on April 18th.
• The regular meeting place will be Building 8 of the Sun Austin campus at the intersection of Parmer Lane and Riata Vista.  The address is 5300 Riata Park Court Austin, TX 78727.
• Each meeting will have the general agenda:
• 6:00-7:00pm: Food, drinks, networking
• 7:00-8:30pm: Presentation/content
• 8:30-9:00pm: Q&A,offline discussions from presentation, more networking
• Initial list of topics:
• Solaris on non-Sun HW
• Lights Out Mgmt
  
• CoolStack/SAMP - MySQL, Postgres
  
• DTrace Deep Dive
  
• Solaris Performance
  
• SMF Deep Dive
  
• Niagra
  
• Virtualization - x64 and SPARC
  
• Resource Management
• The group will eventually have a website and email alias.  For now, we'll use this blog site for public communications.
• Expenses for meetings will be picked up via sponsors.  In return, sponsors will have 10 minutes at the beginning of each meeting to educate the members on who they are.  If you are interested in being a sponsor for future meetings, send me an email.

A big thank you goes out to all attendees of our first meeting - our charter members!  We are excited about the formation of this group and we hope that it will add value to the Sun user community in Austin.

We are in the process of planning the topic for the next meeting.  As soon as the details are nailed down, I'll post them to this blog site.   That's it for now!

I've been struggling with how to define Web 2.0.  Apparently, other people have as well...until now.  There's a pretty cool video on YouTube located here that I found on Bob Brewin's blog.  Enjoy!
 

It's been an exciting couple of days for me here in Austin.  On Friday, we kicked off the Project Blackbox (PBB) road tour with a special on-site visit at the main AMD campus.  Today, we had an event at the Austin Sun campus.  You can follow the road tour progress at the the PBB blog.  If you haven't heard of it yet, PBB is the world's first virtualized data center to radically improve time to deployment, costs and efficiency.  It's all about putting a production ready data center inside a standard 20' shipping container. I presented PBB details and conducted tours of the prototype unit for both events.  Customer feedback has been outstanding!  It's apparent that Sun is addressing real problems here.  I can't wait to see it take off when we formally launch it later this calendar year (mid-year).

Ok, let me get the obligatory Computer Science phrase out of the way first ... printf("hello world\n");  I was going to title this entry 'hello world' but I figured that's been over done.  However, I've already used 3 sentences talking about it so that's worse. ;^)  Anyway,  what does "I'm back" mean?  Well, I'm currently serving my second term at Sun as a Systems Engineer.  I started at Sun in September 1995 as an SE and stayed up until May 2006.  I left and went to a small startup computer company called Egenera.  Egenera has a utility computing product based on HW blades using AMD and Intel processors and a SW management tool called PAN Manager.  I learned a lot about the utility computing market and virtualization while I was there.  Through my contacts at Sun, I learned of an open SE position in Austin, TX.  My family has always dreamed about living there one day (we live in the Dallas, TX area now) and I figured that this was our opportunity. So in October 2006, I came back to Sun without too much grief from my co-workers. :^)  I'm glad I spent my time at Egenera but I'm excited to be back at Sun.  I've returned with a new sense of purpose and a deeper passion. I believe that we are at a major inflection point (for the good) in the history of the company.  We have the best product line up ever.  We have the best workforce on the planet.  And last but not least, we have a huge market demand.