With over 3200 people in attendance, Sun Tech Days 2008 in St. Petersburg, Russia was another successful developer event, and I had the pleasure of working with my colleagues from the local Sun office. It was nice to return to St. Petersburg. I visited Leningrad in December 1988, so I noticed a lot of change. The city is definitely the Paris of the north. I gave the OpenSolaris Testing and OpenStorage for OpenSolaris presentations during OpenSolaris Day on April 4th. I gave the presentations in the main hall where the keynotes where given and had a great audience of over 150 people. Alexander Belokrylov did a great job with the demos, and I enjoyed engaging with the audience and got cheers everytime I spoke a little Russian. I have never seen better questions, and we had more questions than time after both presentations.

I also had the pleasure of working with Jim Hughes during the Solaris keynote on the second day. Using zfs, we setup a raidz2 zpool with eight drives and Jim proceeded to smash two with a sledgehammer, which very effectively demonstrated zfs replication capabilities. Jim published the video as ZFS is Smashing Baby on YouTube.

Here's a picture of Jim, Kirill Nikonchuk, who setup the hardware and me the night before. We had some USB issues with a PC clone, but once we switch to a Sun Ultra 40 everything worked. This picture was taken unattended by timer from the keynote podium.



Later in the day after the keynote, my wife Suzanne and I climbed up to the colonnade on St. Isaac's Cathedral to enjoy the view. Here's a picture of me in a Z-DAY tshirt, which highlights Halloween 2005, when zfs was first integrated into Solaris.