Marc Hamilton's Weblog
Sun xVM Virtualization Portfolio Launch
I'm definitely looking forward to the September 10th launch of the Sun xVM Virtualization Portfolio.
Today's launch by Google of their new Chrome browser, for anyone who has looked at the technology details, proves for sure that there are threads and cores aplenty to use on today's desktop. But beyond downloading your web email and that video you want to watch in separate processes (executing on separate threads or cores), how do you use the ever more powerful multi-core and multi-thread servers coming to market? Because it is based on open source technology, xVM technology such as xVM Server is being developed not just by Sun, but by scores of others, including, not surprisingly, Intel. If you are Intel, what better way to ensure you have a virtualization platform ready to take advantage of every new CPU virtualization feature in your next CPU than to write the code yourself. While Intel has limited sway to influence VMware or Microsoft to bring new features to market, with open source products like xVM Server they can do the work themselves. That works out pretty good for the xVM team too.
Logon September 10th to find out the latest.
Posted at 02:11PM Sep 03, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[0]
Sun & Mitel
This is a great 17 minute video with Scott McNealy and Mitel Chairman Terry Matthews presenting our unified voice and ultra thin client desktop solution.
Posted at 01:33PM Aug 26, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[0]
Boston Running
I needed to be on the East coast last Friday and today, so rather than spend 12 hours on planes I spent the weekend in Boston and got in three great runs. The Westin Copley Place is my favorite centrally located hotel in Boston. Four short blocks from the Charles River, you can run for miles in either direction. I've spent many a cold winter day running along the snow-packed Charles River (the blacktop jogging/bike path does tend to clear quickly after all but the worst storms). But this was a perfect weekend for running in Boston, maybe the best I've experienced. Exit the Westin on Dartmouth St. and turn left and head towards the Charles River. There is an overpass at Storrer Drive which is more like a mini freeway than a drive.
My standard run is to turn left after the overpass when you hit the Charles River running path, continue about 3 miles to the Cambridge St. bridge, cross over, then run back on the opposite side, re-crossing the Charles at Massachusetts Ave. The total run is about 7 miles and you can always extend further across the Charles at either end. Want a bit of a shorter run, just don't cross the Charles and turn around anytime you feel like it.
Of course, after running, you will be hungry. On Friday afternoons, there is a wonderful farmers market right on Copley Square outside the Marriot. At least one night, you will have to head out to the North End for carb loading at Giacomes. They open at 4 and get there any later and join the crowd in the line outside. A tiny dining room with seating for only about 35, the wait can easily be an hour or more. No reservations. But they did make it into Rachael Ray's $40/day FoodNetwork show.
Of course what is a weekend in Boston without seafood. A must-visit is Union Oyster House, the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the U.S. Do get reservations here or be prepared for another hour plus wait. They serve some of the best New England lobster in Boston, supposedly from the Canadian coast. If you have never eaten whole lobster, they are nice enough to crack it for you, although I prefer doing the work myself. I'd recommend the medium, it won't break your budget and always more tender and flavorful than their older, larger siblings.
So there you have it, one weekend, three runs, two great dinners (you are on your own for Sunday night, but if you can't find a good place to eat in Boston...)
Posted at 01:33PM Aug 25, 2008 by marchamilton in Running | Comments[2]
Running At Americas Sales Meeting
A packed schedule this week at Sun's Americas Sales Meeting at Gaylord National conference center on the Potomac River just south of D.C. It is really quite an impressive and well designed hotel and conference center that anchors the new National Harbor development. It won't, however, be a week for long runs. It is about a 5K loop around the center, and the only way out beyond that is onto one of several expressways. Given my 6:30 am - 12:30 am schedule the next few days, I won't really miss my long runs, and will probably just hit the well equipped gym tomorrow morning.
But if anyone finds a way out of here for a longer run, let me know, by Friday I may be ready for it.
Posted at 12:44PM Aug 04, 2008 by marchamilton in Running | Comments[2]
Cuil and the Buildout of the Web
Anyone who thinks the Web buildout is over must not have heard of Cuil the new search engine launched today by a cadre of ex Google employees. If anyone told Microsoft and Yahoo the search battle was over, they sure didn't bother telling Cuil. Apparently a few more people than expected wanted to try out Cuil, as the site has been up and down all morning, but I'm sure that will get fixed over time. Be it search or social networking or any one of 100's of other opportunities, existing companies and new companies alike are growing and finding new business models on the net. Facebook too passe, try MyYearBook. I applaud the founders of Cuil for coming up with some new ideas and trying them out. I was able to do a few searches, and while "Marc Hamilton Sun Microsystems" initially returned zero matches, a search on "Marc Hamilton" returned a number of relevant and interesting results. Good luck to Cuil, and if you need some help on that Web infrastructure building, feel free to drop me a Tweet
PS, the Marc Hamilton Sun Microsystems search on Cuil is working much better now.
Posted at 12:35PM Jul 28, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
New M-Series Quad Core Systems Debut
Most of what you
would want to know about the updated M-Series Sun SPARC Enterprise servers can be found on
Sun's web page. While timing of marketing announcements always varies, what I will say is that unlike other vendors who announce products months before they ship, Sun has already shipped a significant quantity of SPARC64 VII quad-core processors and we have received very good feedback from these customers on the performance improvements. As with any processor that doubles the number of cores, your performance may vary. But no matter if you are just purchasing a single M-series CPU board with 4 processors (16 processor cores) to upgrade an existing system or buying a fully loaded
with 256 processor cores and 2 TB of memory, the latest SPARC64 VII chip provides real life performance improvements to the M-series platform.
For instance, on the
SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution benchmark which represents tasks performed in real-world ERP environments, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 64 processors 256 cores, and 512 threads, supports 39,100 users, which beats the IBM Power 595 (35,400 SD users) by more than 10 percent, and the HP Integrity SD64B (30,000 SD users) by over 30 percent. But don't expect the new M-series to show up only in back-office ERP environments. For HPC users, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series M9000 also ran 2.023 teraflops on the Linpack HPC benchmark, delivering 2x the performance over SPARC64 VI. Lets just say more than one HPC customer has been looking at the new M-series.
How can you start taking advantage of the performance of a 512 thread SMP server today? Start by downloading
OpenSolaris and booting up the live-boot CD image on your laptop. Because one thing is for sure, that other OS you are running definitely doesn't scale to 512 threads and 2 TB of memory. And if the M9000-64 is a little too big for your application, you can start with smaller SPARC64 VII based systems, down to the
M4000, a 4-way rack optimized server, now with 16 processor cores and up to 128 GB RAM.
Posted at 12:06PM Jul 14, 2008
by marchamilton in General |
Comments[1]
Comings and Goings From Austin
In a 30,000+ person company like Sun, someone joins or leaves the company in some city around the world nearly every day. Yes, I know we had a lot more goings than comings this week, and as the goings have been documented elsewhere I thought I would focus on one of the comings and welcome the newest member of my staff, Brady Johns, Sun's new North America x86 Sales Director.
Now as a California native, I must say I have a preference for my hometown over just about any other city. But how can you not like Austin. I end up going to Austin a lot. Last summer I spent some time there in my previous job negotiating our Solaris OEM agreement with Dell. And of course, Austin is the home of the world's fastest x86 supercomputer, the Sun Constellation System powered Ranger cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. I even spent July 4th weekend reading a book about another Texan, Marcus Luttrell. So as I looked to grow our x86 sales team, when I ran across Brady, I realized he was exactly the right person to lead the charge. Quite unfortunate for that other computer company in Austin, but I think very good for Sun and for Brady. Now I just need to teach Brady to use Sun's blogging system and I'll be all set.
Posted at 03:35PM Jul 11, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Sun xVM Server Sneak Peak
Sun xVM Server is still under development. Early releases will be available late in the Summer of 2008. Until then you can get a sneak peek of some of the early user interface page designs.
Posted at 09:05AM Jun 27, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Favorite Runs - Dresden Germany
One of my easiest to navigate runs, starting from the Westin Hotel in Dresden Germany. Go out the back door of the hotel, walk a few feet to the beautiful Elbe River that runs along the historic old town, and turn left or right. You can run for miles along the river in either direction. This morning was near perfect running weather, 15 degrees and light rain. I've been coming to Dresden this time of year for 3 years now, and this morning was the first time I turned right. You run by several marinas and riverfront clubs like CityBeach Dresden. Now time to listen to Andy Bechtolsheim kick off day two of our HPC Consortium meeting.
Posted at 12:06AM Jun 16, 2008 by marchamilton in Running |
HPCVL's New T5140 Cluster
Here is what our press release said about the new UltraSPARC T2 Plus powered compute cluster at HPCVL, one of Canada's leading HPC research centers. If you prefer to hear what HPCVL is doing with the nearly 10,000 compute threads in their new cluster, visit HPCVL's web site which has quite a bit more information. Better yet, attend Sun's HPC Consortium meeting, being held next weekend prior to next week's International Supercomputer Conference. Ken Edgecombe, Director of HPCVL will be there describing early experiences with their new cluster which was installed several months ago. Karl Schulz, Associate Director of TACC will be there, talking about the ground-breaking work TACC had done this year with the world's most powerful x86 based supercomputer. Sign up for our NDA session and you can hear Sun co-founder and Chief Architect Andy Bechtolsheim talk about what new developments Sun is working on for even more powerful supercomputers. It promises to be a great weekend and a busy week.
Posted at 07:08AM Jun 10, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[4]
Web Scale Infrastructure
Even a lot of Sun employees ask me how many customers really need a 1RU server with 128 threads like our T5140. Lots of customers building web scale infrastructure, that is who. Many people have heard about Twitter. Started out as a site that posted short txt messages sent from your cell phone. I'm sure the original site designers sat down and thought about how many users they would get if they were wildly successful, how fast you can type on a cell phone, calculated the max txt message size ... well you get the picture. But just in the last few weeks, we have seen new ways to "tweet" as they say. There is the BeTwittered app that lets you send a tweet directly from your iGoogle home page. Not to be outdone, you can now load a Facebook widget that automatically sends your Facebook status updates to Twitter. I'm sure there are many other ways today to send in your tweets as well. So more and more, my iGoogle BeTwittered widget times out and doesn't load and when I go directly to twitter.com this is becoming more common:
Not to be outdone by fancy new social networking startups, Amazon.com showed signs of growing popularity too today with a friendly page stating,
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.
Just two ever more recurring examples of growing web scale infrastructure needs. So next time someone asks me how many T5140's does Sun really think it well sell, I'll ask them to go try to figure out how many requests a second they think a site like Twitter or Amazon needs to process.
Posted at 11:36AM Jun 06, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[3]
OpenOffice.Org 3.0 Beta Feedback
I've been using the new OpenOffice.Org 3.0 Beta for about a week now, and would highly recommend it, especially for Mac users. I work with literally dozens of spreadsheets, presentations, and text documents a day, and do 100% of it with OpenOffice, switching between a Mac laptop, an x86 laptop running OpenSolaris, and SunRay thin clients including one in my home office. But let me focus on the Mac version as that is where the biggest usability improvements are.
First the install. After downloading, you simply drag the OpenOffice icon to the Mac applications folder and everything else is automagically setup for you, just like you would expect on a Mac. The previous version of OpenOffice is renamed to OpenOffice 2.2 in your Apps folder in case you need to use it (100's of files with 3.0 and I have not had to go back once). All existing OpenOffice files, mail attachments, web links, etc. are automatically updated to open with OpenOffice 3.0 so no additional setup is needed.
Rather than requiring X11, which, while available on the Mac OS DVD, is not installed by default (which can be problematic for those of us who always misplace media), OpenOffice runs natively on the Mac window system. That means you get all the OpenOffice menus on the Mac menu bar instead of the X11 window menu bar. Lets face it, 99% of today's Mac users have never used X11 and while user interface design purists may argue that a global menu bar is not good interface design, it is hard to argue with the popularity of the Mac guy.
Finally, perhaps my favorite improvement, OpenOffice 3.0 now uses the Mac's "Apple" key for all menu shortcuts, versus the Control key used by previous versions. Finally, millions of neurons and synapses freed up by no longer having to remember to use Control-
Try it out, always free, always open source, OpenOffice.Org 3.0 Beta, for OpenSolaris, as well as your favorite non open source operating systems (including, if you must, Windows).
Posted at 08:42PM Jun 03, 2008
by marchamilton in General |
Comments[1]
On Changes in Sun's Global Sales and Services Organization
Sun announced today several changes to its Global Sales and Services organization. Those that follow Sun's executive management should not find it surprising that within minutes of the obligatory SEC Filings our CEO was sharing his thoughts via his blog and via an internal video (not posted here) and introducing Peter Ryan, our new head of sales, to all employees via an online video. I've had the pleasure of working directly for Peter in my current role and couldn't be more please about him being selected to lead our entire sales and services organization.
Posted at 06:45PM Jun 02, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Big Buck Bunny and Web 3.0
Some computer companies are still trying to figure out what Web 2.0 is all about. One competitor recently announced they were merging their HPC and and Web 2.0 team into a new scalable datacenter infrastructure team. At Sun, we have long known that the technologies that often are first proved out by HPC Research Centers quickly find their way into web infrastructure applications. For instance, Sun's Lustre file system, used by 7 of the Top 10 supercomputers and approximately half of the Top 500 was already being used by some of China's largest web companies several years ago. Web startups small and large, especially those in countries like China, Russia, India, and Brazil, have made it a habit to keep their initial costs low by using free and open source software like Lustre and Sun's MySQL database. And most HPC sites use MySQL somewhere too.
So what about Web 3.0? At Sun, we just see Web 3.0 as the natural evolution of Web 2.0. On the web front of the equation, it is all about people doing more online. Do you Twitter from your Facebook page, use the BeTwittered widget from your iGoogle home page, the old fashion way from your cell phone, or all of the above? Or have you moved on to using Twitpic? If all of this sounds Greek to you, you probably don't work on my solutions team. But people are doing a lot more than just uploading txt msgs or grainy cell phone videos on the web, check out this animated film on Vimeo. The animated video was rendered on Network.Com. So is that an HPC or a Web app? It is both, of course.
Posted at 08:23AM Jun 02, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[1]
NASA's Phoenix Probe Lands on Mars
And speaking of NASA, the Phoenix probe landed on Mars today.
Posted at 05:57PM May 25, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Not Your Father's NASA
An interesting Wired article on NASA, not to be confused with OpenNasa.com.
Worthwhile reading for anyone over 30 who knows, works with, or interacts with anyone under 30. Myself? Getting ready to make homemade enchiladas cause my wife is out with friends and my teenage daughter and son are both having their Gen-Y friends over for dinner.
Posted at 05:40PM May 23, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
What Is Our Most Popular Product This Month?
Let me give you some clues. Earlier this week Sun announced a number of new servers supporting AMD's latest quad core "Barcelona" processors like the Sun Fire x4140, with eight cores, 16 DIMM slots, and 8 internal drives with over 1 TB of storage capacity in a compact 1RU form factor and its big brother, the
Sybase certainly thought so, they recently set a Guinness World Record for the world's largest database, over 1 PetaByte of data and over six trillion rows of transaction data. Now that is a big database. What server did they choose to set this world record with? Sun's M9000. OK, so most users of Sun's MySQL database may be more interested in a
x4440 and a
Guinness beer, I'm not sure there are any 1 PetaByte MySQL databases yet. But I wouldn't bet against MySQL moving into this range in the future. Meanwhile, lots of customers who need to run really large databases and other open systems applications are turning to the capabilities of Sun's M9000.
Congratulations to Sybase on their new world record! Now I think I'll grab my Guinness, the liquid one not the hardback.
Posted at 08:32PM May 16, 2008
by marchamilton in General |
Download OpenSolaris Now at OpenSolaris.com
Everyone on the planet can now get OpenSolaris from:
The OpenSolaris 2008.05 release is no longer just for developers, it now comes with two subscription support offerings from Sun Services, OpenSolaris Essentials Subscription Support and OpenSolaris Production Subscription Support .
Posted at 08:01AM May 05, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
VirtualBox 1.6 and OpenSolaris RC3
I had a spare moment this weekend, so I downloaded the newest release of VirtualBox for my Mac. While a lot of people may use VirtualBox to run Windows on their Mac, I decided to try out the latest release candidate, RC3, for OpenSolaris running in VirtualBox. At the same time I installed OpenSolaris RC3 on an extra AthlonX2 laptop.
If you are not a Sun employee, you will have to wait a bit longer to try out the latest OpenSolaris, but not too long. I expect we had plenty of copies to hand out this weekend at the second OpenSolaris Developer Summit. I love the new OpenSolaris background and menu graphics. The graphics even caught my teenage son's attention as he walked by, "much cooler than your old Solaris", he mentioned.
Like the two earlier OpenSolaris Developer Previews, OpenSolaris RC3 fits on a CD and live boots. I was even able to live boot it on my Mac! Very cool. It should be an interesting week at JavaOne, kicking of tomorrow with CommunityOne
Posted at 04:55PM May 04, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Cinco de OpenSolaris
Living in Southern California, there is no lack of reminders that next Monday is Cinco de Mayo. But while I love Mexican food, on Monday I'll be celebrating at CommunityOne, or Cinco de OpenSolaris as I would rather call it. Here is a quick clip of over 100 Cinco de OpenSolaris fans who live very far away from Mexico celebrating the first release candidate.
No, OpenSolaris is definitely not your father's Solaris. Except perhaps for Chase.
Posted at 09:13AM May 01, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Favorite Runs - Ipanema Beach
Three flights, three business dinners, three cities, two analyst lunches and no running, I finally found my way to what I had been looking forward to all week. I checked into my hotel in Rio De Janeiro last night after 11 pm, left the curtains open, and awoke early this morning facing a beautiful view of my running path. Unlike some of my other favorite runs requiring elaborate directions, this one is easy, walk out of hotel, cross street, turn left or right, and run. The LED sign at the corner read 6:09 and 21 degrees, but the shade soon turned to bright sun and the next sign already read 24. I started slowly, paying for my sins of over-indulging in Brazilian seafood last night, not to mention three days with no exercise. But after about a mile, my usual pace returned.
Ipanema is a beautiful, wide, sandy beach, with both a coblestoned walking path and a smooth paved bike path running between the beach and the road. The small coblestones did not make for great running, but I quickly noticed that with few bikers out, most joggers were taking advantage of the bike path so I soon switched. The road was already filling with morning commuters, but thanks to the widespread use of flexfuel engines and gas stations selling alcohol based fuel for less than half the price of gasoline, I was not bothered by exhaust fumes. I should cross-post on Greenmonk, Rio is such a better place for conventions than Vegas for so many reasons.
I was going to try a technology free blog, but can´t resist. The Eco computing movement is not as prevelant in Brazil, the land of mainframes, as elsewhere. Not one single customer told me they were using mainframes to save energy. I find it striking that a country with one of the largest open source communities in the world is also one of the biggest users of mainframes. Of course the mainframe legacy is easily explained by anyone who has studied the history of the IT industry in Brazil, having been closed to most computer imports through the mid-eighties, Brazilian companies shunned locally produced minicomputers for mainframes. That legacy still lives on in many large companies here, but I have to wonder for how long? How many Brazilian open source programmers are developing for the mainframe? Even a large bank I met with yesterday commented that while they ran DB2 on the mainframe, it was increasingly hard to find DB2 developers and administrators while everyone they had hired in the last few years knew MySQL. I told the customer not to hold their breath for a mainframe port of MySQL.
Posted at 04:33AM Apr 25, 2008 by marchamilton in Running | Comments[3]
What To Do With 10,000 Threads of T5140
There has been lots of great blogs by Sun engineers on the capabilities and features of the new T5140 server and UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor announced this week. Take a look at what one large HPC customer, Canada's High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory is doing with their 10,000 thread cluster, aptly named Victoria Falls.
Posted at 10:52AM Apr 11, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Change is Good
It was a big day for changes today. Sun released their first two socket CMT (Chip Multi Threading) servers based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. There are dozens of Sun engineer blogs today going into tons of technical detail, but for those of you perhaps less familiar with CMT I thought I would give a brief overview.
Almost all modern microprocessors today are multi-core, that is they have two or more CPU cores packaged into a single chip which fits into a socket on your computer. Until just a few years ago, that was not the case. In part, what enables multi-core and CMT processors is Moore's Law which states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will roughly double every 18 months (as the transistor size shrinks by half due to process improvements). For at least twenty years, ending in about 2005, companies that designed CPUs focused primarily on the smaller transistor size and larger transistor count to run their CPUs at a faster clock rate. But this had diminishing returns. Many of us remember upgrading our 1 GHz PC for a 2 GHz PC, only to find that our web browser or word processor really didn't run much faster. While there are many application bottlenecks (such as getting data from the network and reading or writing to your disk drive), the main thing that slows down most applications is reading and writing data to your system's memory. And memory speeds have only doubled every six years or so, meaning that buying a processor that ran at a 2x clock rate, when your application was limited by memory speeds, did little to improve overall performance. So for twenty years, microprocessor designers focused on a technique called instruction level parallelism to actually get more work done as the CPU speed increased. Basically, instruction level parallelism looks for opportunities to execute different parts of the same computer instruction in parallel. But as clock rates get into multi-gigahertz, even the best instruction level parallelism can't keep up, at least says some of the best known computer architects in the world, like John Hennessy.
If you don't recognize the name, John Hennessy, is President of Stanford University and one of the best known professors of electrical engineering and computer science thanks to his seminal textbook Computer Architecture: A Quantitive Approach. Professor Hennessy gave a talk at USC in 2005 which I attended with my teenage daughter (who isn't particularly into computer architecture). In his talk, he called 2005 the end of the road for instruction level parallelism. He then went on to describe Sun's Niagara 1 (UltraSPARC T1) processor, which would soon become the world's first processor to have eight cores each being able to execute 4 separate programs, or threads, in parallel. Rather than look for diminishing opportunities to execute parts of the same instruction in parallel, the Niagara processor does almost no instruction level parallelism but executes entire programs, or threads, in parallel, up to 32 in the original Niagara 1 processor. My daughter left the talk rather excited saying, "dad, now I understand what Sun is doing and why you get so excited about it".
Sun subsequently open sourced the design of the Niagara processor then went on to build the Niagara 2 (UltraSPARC T2) processor, which is able to run a total of 64 threads in parallel, 8 each on its 8 cores. Today, Sun launched the T5140 and T5240 servers, the world's first two socket CMT servers. Powered by two UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, these servers can execute an amazing 128 threads at the same time. So, you might ask, why would you ever need 128 threads on your desktop? I can think of one thread to run my word processor, one to be download a web page in the background, and if I'm feeling really creative maybe another thread to be encoding a video. But 128 threads, who needs that?
The answer, of course, is that you don't need 128 threads today on your desktop, but lots of server applications can use this many threads and more. Think of a web server responding to 128 page view requests or a server running Sun's MySQL database updating 128 bank account records, or just about anything else you would do on the web today. We have been quietly shipping these servers for several weeks already, and plenty of customers have had a chance to find things to do with their 128 threads. HPCVL, one of Canada's regional HPC centers is already using several dozen of these servers to run their highly threaded HPC applications. If you are wondering how it might work for you, you can try one free for sixty days, we even pay the return shipping if you don't end up buying it.
One thing to note, your operating system will have to know how to effectively handle 128 threads. Unless you are using Solaris, the operating system you are probably using on your x86 server most likely handles no more than 8 or perhaps 16 threads effectively. Luckily, Sun's Solaris operating system has been able to run powerful servers with this many threads for years and helps you get the maximum performance out of your T5140 or T5240 server. In the same 1RU or 2RU space of a typical x86 server, you can get five times or more the performance. Of course no single server or CPU is optimized for all applications, so we still will keep building our other servers, including our M9000 server (which runs up to 256 threads using a more conventional 64-socket SMP design) and our AMD and Intel powered rack mount and blade servers. In fact, I'm headed to Intel's Portland engineering center later this week to give a talk to some of their engineers. Not on the T5140 of course, but on Solaris. While Intel's current 4 core processors only run 1 thread per core today, Intel has certainly talked about their plans to build CPUs with more cores and more threads per core, which is exactly why they are spending so much time working with Sun engineers to optimize Solaris for their current and future x86 based CPUs.
And on the topic of change is good, I decided to change my hair style today. Actually, I lost a bet which is why I ended up with this change.
Posted at 11:49PM Apr 09, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[4]
April 9th NYC Product Launch
Two redeye flights in three days and I'm in NYC, meeting with customers prior to tomorrow's big product launch event. Our sun.com/launch page will be updated tomorrow with all the details, but I expect a lot of the really interesting details will be posted at blogs.sun.com by actual engineers who worked on the projects being launched.
Rick Hetherington, VP and co-CTO of Sun Microelectronics and Massood Heydari, VP SPARC Volume Systems will hold a live technical chat at 12 noon EDT on April 9th that you won't want to miss. You can also catch up with the launch tomorrow on Second Life.
Posted at 09:25AM Apr 08, 2008 by marchamilton in General |
Spotting Trends
When my two teenage kids tell me I haven't updated my blog for a while, it is a clear sign of a trend I need to reverse. Having just finished up my first quarter leading our systems sales organization for the Americas, I've had a chance to see on a daily basis the buying trends of our customers. Of course, I'll have to wait until after we announce our quarterly earnings to talk about last quarters trends in the Americas. But after a quarter of hard work, and it being the kids Spring break, we headed to Hawaii this week for a little R&R.
Before I left, I stopped by a retail outlet of my wireless carrier and purchased a USB wireless data card. I need to read email in so many different airports, hotels, and customer sites that still don't have WiFi access that I decided the investment would be well worth it. This week alone I have easily paid for my first month's service costs with the saving. Hard to say which trend will be more popular in the future, WiFi or Cellular Wireless Data, but it is nice to have a wide variety of choices. More on hotels later.
As for trends, you can tell interesting ones running the backroads of Hawaii. By today's count, RedBull is clearly the drink of choice based on the roadside litter. While not personally a fan of energy drinks, I do like the RedBull brand. What other energy drink sponsors their own Formula 1 racing team?
Of course, I do have to tie this back to computers. RedBull Racing uses a lot of computers to design their racing cars, perfect customer to consider our Sun Constellation System high performance computing solution built around the Sun Blade 6048. Of course, these days, a lot of different customers are buying the Sun Blade 6048 besides HPC users like TACC. We sold several Sun Blade 6048 systems to a customer in the Middle East to run a large retail point of sale system with SunRay ultra-thin clients as the front end. Talk about fast service, how would you like your retail transaction to be processed on a SunRay powered by the same system that runs one of the world's fastest supercomputers. We have also sold Sun Blade 6048 systems to a large organization involved in aircraft design. I guess if you can design jet aircraft on Sun Blade 6048's they should be fast enough to design cars, after all, even slow jets go faster than fast Formula 1 cars. And yes, we have even sold Sun Blade 6048's to other traditional HPC centers including a national HPC research center in Asia and one in Europe.
Back to slower transport, longtime readers of my blog will recognize that if I'm in Hawaii, I must be doing one of my favorite runs. Unfortunately, our favorite hotel the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel is closed for renovations following structural damage in the last earthquake. We actually tried a larger, more luxurious hotel nearby. Unfortunately it didn't compare and my wife, ever the good shopper, spotted an add in the local newspaper for a ridiculously low rate for "best available room" at a nearby "thatched hut on the beach" resort and we decided to try it out. I'm writing this from my beachfront thatched hut, about 20 feet from the high tide line, in fact in one of the best rooms (or huts) at the resort. Sometimes you just get lucky. We will make do with the single bathroom. Having just run 10 miles, the rest of my family will ensure I get my turn at the shower before dinner. And yes, my wireless data card works here, and there is no WiFi (or wired Internet) access.
That's it for today's trends. Check back after May 1 for more info on the sales trends we saw in the Americas last quarter, but suffice it to say that we not only sold AMD and Intel based servers, we sold Niagara and Niagara 2 based CMT (Chip Multi-Threading Servers), along with high end SPARC servers like the 64 processor Sun Enterprise M9000 (yes, we still make lots of big SPARC SMP servers that are great for running your SAP or Oracle applications on).
Posted at 09:34PM Apr 03, 2008 by marchamilton in General | Comments[4]