Wednesday April 16, 2008

Sunray Server strategy shift

Chris and myself have described our high regard for the SunRay technology and how we use it in the office and at home. We have a Solaris10 'FCS' server which runs the latest Solaris10 update release. This is for our users who do not want to be on the bleeding edge. This is still a E4900 with two system boards and a total 128GB of memory. We then had another E4900 with the very latest Ultrasparc processors from the lab pool keeping them warm until they are needed for customer support. This platform was divided into two domains. These two domains would be upgraded in turn to new builds of what we call Solaris Nevada. This exposes us to the latest technology and fixes that I believe always go into Nevada first before going back into say the Solaris 10 patch or feature gates. Anyway this was all good until someone said why not have a x86 box? So we put in a well configured V40Z. This extends the time between upgrades of each of the servers (six weeks) and is good as it means the server runs longer hopefully finding memory leak problems or other issues that are only found when systems run for longer periods of time.

What we are not expecting to find was an Xsun bug you would only see on x86 platforms.

When we announced the first Niagara2 machines we felt duty bound to give one a go and within hours of running one we had a really interesting bug Tim looked at that and again you would only see in Nevada and on the Niagara2 platform. Within a few weeks we then had another bug this time you would only see on the latest Ultrasparc IV+ processors again on Nevada. We have also found and logged several application bugs and some relating to the Gnome desktop. The oddest one I logged was BugID 6564048 with the title of Nevada lp prints non-existent files! So given all this tangible benefits of running these platforms we have decided to keep:

Sunfire V890 Server replacing the E4900 - this is a smaller size box - with the latest Ultrasparc IV+ that you can get for this box.

Sunfire T5220 server eight cores, 64GB memory.

And the Sunfire V40Z server.

Should be interesting...

Wednesday January 24, 2007

White Wednesday after Black Tuesday...

After Excellent news on Black Tuesday where we reported that in Q2 we returned to profit and again beat the analysts best predictions. Well done to everyone in Sun and our partners for making this happen. Meanwhile I bring you White Wednesday the first snow fall of 2007.

This picture is dedicated to all my friends in the Asia Pacific Region who never get to see this stuff...

Thursday December 14, 2006

Want a job at Sun for a year ?

If you are a UK student and are doing a gap year starting July next year - for a year and are interested in working in my lab team in Camberley, Surrey then drop me an email with your CV and a covering letter. Here is the job description - and other info.

Exciting Student Placement
at Sun Microsystems !

Description

The student will gain knowledge of Sun's hardware range, system
and application software. In addition he/she will benefit from
working within a highly experienced software/hardware team and
indeed be part of that team.
The position will be working in the two labs in the Camberley ( Surrey )
office for 1 year starting in July 2007. The successful candidate will
gain exposure to Sun's latest hardware and software offerings as they
are released.

Tasks undertaken by the student may include the following:
Installation, configuration (hardware and software) , tuning and system
administration of lab systems and project work in the lab. This will
enable the student to gain hands on experience and knowledge of Unix
hardware and associated system software.
There will be opportunities for students to undertake project work in
the lab. These may include ongoing planning and development or
expansion of the laboratory infrastructure.

Requirements

Willingness and ability to absorb a large amount of information
within a short timeframe.
Ability to co-operate and communicate effectively with other
people.

The candidate MUST have at least one years experience of using
Unix, for example Solaris, Linux or similar. The experience must
cover installing Unix and other administration tasks. This should
include network (LAN/Internet) setup, user administration, software
upgrades/patching and file system maintenance. You should grade
yourself as having a good theoretical and practical understanding of
your preferred Unix platform.

Experience or knowledge in the following technical areas would
be a distinct advantage:

Unix skills (user/administration)         (essential)
Networking                                (essential)
Shell scripting                           (essential)
Experience of PC or Sun Hardware          (essential)
Structured programming techniques         (preferable)
Scripting languages (perl/tcl/php)        (preferable)

Training in some of these areas will be given where required
We expect applicants to write us a covering letter to accompany their
CV explaining why their skills make them a suitable candidate. The
letter should also cover what they would expect to get out of the one
year working in Sun in this position.

Friday December 08, 2006

A week in Singapore

Despite the fact I no longer manage staff in Singapore I was quite happy to agree to attend a meeting there where I was to meet my manager and peers worldwide. We have had these Strategy meetings in the UK and the US and I felt it was important to the lab guys here for us to hold the meeting on their turf. In fact the costs are not much different if we were to meet in the US or UK.

On Sunday a Qantas flight to my second favourite place to work took off after a wet and windy start to the Sunday morning which had given way to brilliant sunshine. During the long twelve hour flight I amused myself with a recent addition to the cd collection Gorillaz G sides and two films the first with Charlotte Rampling in Swimming pool secondly Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley. Both were good films although I thought the actor playing Mr Darcey was a bit wooden. I ought to have slept having a vacant seat next to me offering me more room to stretch my legs - but sleeping during your daylight hours is never easy.

Once at Singapore I took the MRT to my hotel and annoyingly despite having early checkinI had to wait until they found a room. A few hours sleep later and I met up with my US peer to go to the office. After work we went to SunTech city and had dinner at a place near the largest fountain in the world - The Fountain of Wealth. The five buildings of SunTech city are layed out in the shape of a hand and the fountain is the palm. I am a creature of habit here I have Pineapple juice and toast for breakfast and on arrival at the office I buy another can of the stuff usually made by the Lee Pineapple Co PTE Ltd in the shop as you enter the building. This time I was staying in the Swiss 'Otel Stamford rather than my preferred Intercontinental at Bugis. My room on the fifty second floor looked over SunTech city to the right is a DHL Balloon that takes you up so get a good view of the city before returning to ground.

The next three days we had our meeting, Wednesday evening we went to the famous East coast Jumbo seafood place and had the drunken prawns and Peppered crab which were excellent. On the Thursday evening I met up with a friend who I first met in Singapore on my first visit and we had a few beers at the Crazy Elephant, Clarke Key. Before 10pm I left him and wandered back having a fast food dinner to soak up the Tiger Beer. As I neared my hotel I was propositioned for the first time in my life in an area that is not known as a Red light district. I declined the kind offer of a massage.

On my last day I went back to the office and we had a lunchtime meal with the lab guys a thank you meal from me to them for being such great employees - as they still are of course. As their new manager was still in town he came along too, also with an admin who I also first met and got to know on my first visit here who now does lots of other stuff like program management.

Eleven 11pm is my flight home time again I will be using the MRT to the airport. The return flight is to be with with British Airways I hope I am lucky enough to come back for another visit before too long. Thanks everyone.

Wednesday November 08, 2006

Meeting the customers!

I met my first Sun customers for many years last week. I was asked if these customers could see the lab and find out how it is used to help solve problems they report to us. I was given half an hour to do the tour. It is really difficult to know what your target audience is - are they managers, techies or both? I started by explaining the two components to the lab what we call stable, machines that engineers jump on when they are speaking to the customer and quickly run a command, read a manual page etc. The second component is what we call crash and burn where we build a setup like the customers and try and reproduce the problem so we can fix it in house instead of sending debug binaries etc for the customer to try. Sometimes however the sending debug binaries/run this dtrace script is the only way forward. I also explained that this lab is just a piece of a truly shared global effort. All of Sun's services engineers wherever they are can use the resources in this virtual global lab. The engineers use the same tools for all our labs worlwide. All of the utilities know and are designed to operate on any piece of lab hardware without having to login to that lab portal.

I then showed them the stock of cards we can put in machines so if you our customer has a certain revision of card we know where it is as we store the fact where all our temporary attachments are in a database. The lab is an impressive sight with all the hardware we support desktops, servers and storage. With our copper and fibre patching we can connect anything to anything without having to move the hardware. I think for the managers to quantity and organised approach to the lab impressed them. The techies stayed on for a bit and wanted to see how we used our copper patching. It is well designed and means our copper patching in the communication frames are all short leads usually half a metre long - making it easy to trace/find cables. The cables are also colour coded again.

It is clear to me now before the next tour I ought to prepare a proper presentation - perhaps even have a flyer with some statistics on it the amount of disk space, memory cpu power we have in the lab, number of lab hosts and so on. A live demo of using a lab host in a remote lab would also be impressive especially the remote power/web cam demo.

( Nov 08 2006, 12:00:02 AM PST ) Permalink

Friday November 03, 2006

Project Orangebox

I have booked my order for one of these . Excellent article.

Friday October 27, 2006

Growing still...and we are not done yet...

It is good to see the Q1 results looking good for all of Sun. The presentation slides show good growth in all areas. My highlights must be the growth in the x86 platforms impressive as the beefy machines the Blade 8000, X8500 and X8600 are only starting to ship in volume ( I believe )- 52% growth year on year, on a run rate of over $600million! Also impressive is the continued success of the Coolthreads servers and our storage products. Compared to our competiton in servers; we took market share off HP, IBM and Dell and our revenue growth was 15.5%; the others guys was below zero. The bit I really like is we BEAT the Streets tepid expectations and we should all be pleased about that. So some very positive messages from the results, there is still work to do but we are on track to reach the results we all want to achieve. Many thanks to everyone in Sun and to our customers for showing confidence in the products, solutions and services we are delivering.

Tuesday October 24, 2006

Cuckoo clocks and chocolate?

Last week I was working in Switzerland. I had a very early 4am wake up call to catch a taxi to Heathrow to fly to Zurich. I enjoyed myself but here are a few observations about the journey and working over there..

After going through customs at Heathrow a fire alarm sounded. We were hustled into a safe part of the terminal building not before I saw signs proclaiming the successful installation of a new fire alarm system...

My short taxi ride to the area of the Sun office was undertaken by a taxi driver who looked like Rosa Klebb from From Russia with Love. One depressing thing was this taxi driver and the other one we used both threw litter out onto the lovely Swiss countryside...

In this part of the world when you have breakfast a brightly coloured container will be present on your table. It is a mini litter bin...

As I arrived early at my hotel I took the bus and train to Zurich. The great thing for me is the transport systems are fully integrated. When the two systems meet there is a perfectly timed cross over period so you do not wait ages for the other transportation system to make an appearance.

At the train station the ticket office was closed. A kiosk attendant tried to help me navigate my way through the questions to get a ticket. She seemed stuck on one question and asked her friend for help. While she did this I flicked the machine into English. The question she was stuck on was is this a half fare in other words was I a child. Not many under twelves are six feet high, and sporting grey hair...

The trains run like clockwork. They also have route numbers on them so its easy to spot if a train will stop when you want it too - unlike the UK ones that just say where they are going..

Remember to have a two Swiss Franc coin with you always. That seems to be the regular price to visit the loo...

The hotel has a great idea to solve the hotel key problem. As you go out you can secure your room key on a metal plate. You put your key in a slot designated for your room and turn the room key ninety degrees. This releases a smaller sister key which opens the outside door to the hotel only and has no markings to allow someone who steals your key to know what it opens. When you return you put the sister key back and release your door key. Great idea.

Hotels here suffer the same defect as they do in Sweden.

We all know the Continental beers are good. Swiss wine is also excellent. They do not make much so it is not generally exported much.

On the short shuttle ride to terminal E of the fabulous Zurich Airport a short film is shown on the concrete walls as you wizz along. Cows are then heard to moo and their bells too. Very peaceful.

A very enjoyable few days - thanks to my hosts..

Thursday October 19, 2006

Demand free upgrades!

One of the barriers to getting customers to upgrade to a new version of software is usually the time it takes, the risks of the process and of course application support. I remember many years ago upgrading servers in the middle of the night with half inch tapes and later on cdroms whirring as the upgrade ran. The backups one had to take beforehand. Thankfully things are better now but I want to evangelise some technology that takes a lot of the pain away from upgrading.

Sun calls the software Live Upgrade. For non technical folks it basically means you perform the upgrade while the system is still doing the job that you bought it to do without interruption to the service. Once you are happy with the upgrade process result you then reboot your server and you are then running the upgraded system. The main win for this is that if for some reason you have to return to the old version you just reboot off the old disk. Live Upgrade handles these Boot environments with handy aliases so you can remember what to boot from to get what version. Older versions did not support mirrored boot disks but these are now supported.

You don't need to be upgrading Solaris to take advantage of Live Upgrade. You can install packages, patches using it and then bring them into production when you are ready. It takes the risk out of these processes and enables a fall back recovery process for free. If you manage Solaris systems I strongly suggest you take a look at it today.

There is lots more information at these two web sites here and here

Monday October 16, 2006

Ten Gees and eight Panthers

Last weekend we took the opportunity of a power down in our building to install one of these. It is also known as an Aspen switch. It has lots of new features and it was time to retire our old Black Diamond core switch after many years of faithful service. The sorts of things we will be doing with the new switch are ten gigabit networking and IPV6 routing etc.

Although the building was being powered down our production servers had to stay up as we need the information on them twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. We have a UPS/Diesel GenSet to accomplish this. So the first job was to have setup a temporary network to plug all the servers into. This project is a bit like doing a heart transplant. The most difficult bit was to then remove the old core switch and install the new one - both big and heavy. The new switch had already been setup with its vlans and other configuration information beforehand. Once bolted in and checked out we then transferred our servers back onto it. Of course having all the cables labelled was essential to this task...

The next stage will be to install 10G cards in our servers where we are sure the throughput is needed. For instance the links between our SunRay servers and the NFS server, also the NFS server with the source on it and the build boxes. AS we plan to change the two main NFS servers soon this will be easy to do.

Also on that day we installed the latest CPU's for the mid and high end servers. Inside Sun these are known as Panther cpu's. These CPU's have initially been installed in the SunRay servers running Solaris next , Nevada. One board of these speedy CPU's is enough for each of these machines with 64GB of memory on each board. These 1.8ghz CPU's have already won a lot of benchmarks against our competitors. As both of these servers were going to be physically powered off we popped in a ten 10G card in each ready to be enabled when each server takes their turn to get a new version Solaris next

For me my presence was only needed to help do the manual labour and provide drinks when people needed them. Two of this years students and our contractor were able to get some excellent experience helping us do this work. We have some post install work to do. The new core switch has many more one gigabit uplinks so we can now directly attach our edge switches to it rather than go via Summit 1i's. This will make our network simpler to manage and faster we reckon.

Friday July 28, 2006

Hello / Goodbye

Just like the Beatles song we are saying Hello Goodbye . At the beginning of this month our new batch of students started work with us and today three of the old timers leave us. The remaining two leave end of August. As with every year each new batch are different, but a trend seems to be that they always seem more confident and as we get older they stay the same age. Earlier in the week we all went out for a meal and had a curry - what else would you do with blazing temperatures of thirty degrees plus ? The good news is that out of last years bunch three have now got jobs in Sun a testament to them and the training we gave them I like to think. What will happen to this years bunch ? Only time will tell. Meanwhile thanks guys for all your hard work and dedication. Good luck in your final year at University.

Wednesday July 19, 2006

Sun needs your help ! Improving email

I am part of a project that is out to improve the use of email in Sun. It is fair to say that there are people who send good emails and there are those who send emails that are impossible to decipher. Sun has a long history of using email and it never used the traditional memos that perhaps older companies used before they moved to email. It is strange as you would never send out a memo to a thousand people but with one email you can easily do so. So the technology has its strengths and weaknesses most of which result from human activities.

So I have setup a collaboration space on Sun's network where people can add their own bugbears ideas on good email practice etc. But I would like to hear from others on what they think/do. Anything from signature formats, subject lines, use of vacation, using reply/all , forwarding other emails, use of spell checkers and so on. By providing this information you will be helping us, which will make communication with Sun a hopefully even more pleasurable experience than it is now. Thank you in advance.

Friday July 14, 2006

Instant messaging

I must admit the idea of chat rooms as a viable communication medium was not something I considered before. We all know about the horror stories of kids meeting nasty types in such public rooms. It was however suggested we setup a lab room for us to all be in and for customers of the labs to pop in with questions. Chris is also in this room and if we are all out and someone asks a question he will let them know we unavailable etc. He also answers a lot of questions for us too. The really cool thing is that over the last few months the room has really taken off. There used to be a core of lab folks in the room but we now have a lot more who regularly join in. It starts in APAC with the Singapore and Australian folks. Then the folks in France, Germany, Sweden and Spain pop in and the Brits as usual one hour later. Some of the folks in the West coast of the USA join us mid afternoon who are on an early shift. The problem was as Chris said the room was not really used for many questions but more general communication between lab folks around the world. Believe me they talk about some very unusual and funny stuff. The danger was any question from a customer would get lost in the volume of traffic especially when you get the overlap in timezones. So we have another room just for such chatter and use this original one for lab questions from our customers. So I consider myself an Instant messaging proponent as long as you sign off when you are unavailable.

Monday February 27, 2006

A short weekend in Sheffield

We have just got back from a short overnight stay with friends in Sheffield city of hills and rivers and once a place where all your silverware on your table was made. During an uneventful journey up there from our house in Berkshire before we get to the city we pass Chesterfield with its very crooked spire which defies common sense and appears to be quite happy in its odd state. After lunch we went for a walk despite the showery weather into nearby Derbyshire and stopped a nice distance away from Chatsworth. We started our walk to the house by this pretty river and ruin of a house.

We soon got to the house but all its coffee shops were closed so we had to walk back and go to a local garden centre for refreshement.

The following day we drove out to Hodsock Priory Gardens where they open the gardens to allow vistors to see their snowdrops. You wander around the woods and then the formal gardens. Below is a picture of the keep and some of the snowdrops. Hellebores were also in the garden already flowering.

In the garden were some Victorian beehives which were all being used. However because of the cold weather there was no bee activity visible. Seeing them reminded me of my own attempt to keep bees.

Tuesday February 14, 2006

One to watch!

With the version of roller we are now using on blogs.sun.com we can now have weblogs that many people can work on as a team. I am really excited about This one . I expect some really interesting items to appear on it over the weeks ahead.