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