Monday February 04, 2008

A change of plan...

Initially we were going to kick off the Sheffield tech talks with one on ZFS . However after a couple of friends visited another University and did a couple of presentations ( shorter ones however ) on ZFS and another subject it was clear to them their audience knew about but the idea that Sun had an operating system called Solaris , sold their machines with AMD , Intel and Sparc processors inside them, had a wide storage portfolio and numerous other offerings - software stacks and so on was clearly not known to them!

Armed with this information Andrew and myself have decided to do a taster on Sun's technologies. I spent a lot of time looking at Marketing information - and I think I have a collection of Slides that I can draw upon to do our first tech demo on Solaris and the hardware we sell. Hopefully after this the students appetites will be nicely setup for what we have in store. I am also planning to take a couple of machines up with me to show to the students to add a touch of drama to the event. When I joined Sun many years ago I did a series of presentations to customers on how I upgraded our Sun machines to Solaris, I am not a seasoned presenter even now but then we did small groups of less than a hundred, but the biggest event however was in the Barbican where I think there were three hundred in the theatre.. I think that was the easiest - as the lights went off I could not see my audience. For my efforts both myself and my peer got given a Tag Heuer watch. I still have it. The only thing I am worried about this one is doing such a presentation and getting a question I can't answer.. One of this years students is hopefully coming along to help - he hopes to be an ambassador at his university when he leaves us in the autumn so it will be good practise for him!

Back at Sun we have had our second meeting where all the mentors meet and discuss progress problems etc. I think compared to the first meeting us mentors are now seeing the fruits of our support - there is plenty more to do and I think this program will grow over the next few years. On that subject if you think either you and/or your University should be in this program do let us know I am happy to put both Universities or students forward for the next years program starting Autumn 2008.