Wednesday December 13, 2006 Ponder This
Wednesday December 13, 2006 After 6 rewarding years at Sun, I have decided to accept an amazing opportunity outside Sun.
Deciding after 6 years of fighting the fight, that it could be the last and final round was not that easy. I am not one who gives up eaisly. You also get very comfortable. I came to Sun the same way, and had gotten very comfortable in the way I was doing things.
I came to Sun from a Windows world. Lived it, ate it and breathed it. At the time, Solaris did not even have GNOME support and Solaris on X86 was a bad joke. I recall sitting in my house at the time, trying to compile GNOME for Solaris as CDE was unbearable. I honestly was freaking out, wondering how I was going to be productive checking email with dtcal and dtmail? Believe it or not some people are still using dtcal and dtmail but, I will not name any names :)
It has been an unforgettable opportunity here at Sun. I spent the largest portion of these past 6 years focused on driving desktop technology and solutions. I have traveled the globe and worked with some of the best partners, customers and brightest minds in the industry. I have been given the freedom to innovate, speak openly about my ideas and have been allowed to participate in some amazing growth and changes.
I believe Sun Ray technology is the cornerstone of enabling Sun's vision of the network is the computer. Today more than ever, it offers customers the opportunity to choose what environment they display to their end users. Wether its the front end to an AS/400 or Mainframe, delivering a Solaris desktop, a Linux desktop, Windows desktops from a Terminal Server or Windows XP desktops from a VMware based VDI solution, it offers the most flexibility and freedom of choice.
As people connect more devices to the network, naturally changing the way they interact with information from the network, as security concerns grow, as distributed computing management becomes more painful, as technology changes improve the way we deliver rich content and the interaction between the network and the device. I believe, more enterprises will want a display only device such as a Sun Ray deployed in the enterprise.
There are some really passionate people in the desktop community at Sun. When your that close to people, it makes leaving that much harder. While processing my decisions, I could not help but think of the military's policy, leave no man behind. So, why leave right? I am very passionate about participating in the change I believe is occurring in the way desktop computing is done today. I am not ready to give up perusing that passion. I have been offered an amazing opportunity to chase that passion with a team that is just as passionate and full of amazingly talented people. They made it very clear, we share the same passion and wanted me as part of that team to go help make great things happen. It just made sense.
I want to thank everyone at Sun for all their support and camaraderie over the years. Sun is an amazing place. I also want to thank everyone that has called and sent e-mail messages. I have been overwhelmed with sad goodbys. I want to thank you for taking the time to show your continued support!
Posted by ponderthis ( Dec 13 2006, 09:43:16 AM EST ) Permalink Comments [3]
Thursday December 07, 2006 Desktop Virtualization Poll - What path will you take?
I was reading Johnathan's blog the other day with a slight grin because I have heard this story before. Its a classic story, not an uncommon occurrence really in the Technology space where new things come to market at a higher price and are bleeding edge. Over time, they become commodities. Competition catches up, new technology comes out, demand plateaus and prices drop. The sales persons quota never drops though.
I have always found it fascinating in the US as mortgage interest rates drop and herds of people refinance their homes. It seems like sales people of all calibers migrate to being loan originators. When new hot technology comes out and interest rates go up, they migrate back.
I wonder what they will do as rates go up, and all those people that did interest only loans realize they still need to re-finance at a higher rate, than they could have gotten on a 30 year fixed?
There were some interesting perceptions in this blog to ponder.
If you double the performance of a machine, customers don't buy half as many, they tend to double their order. Same goes for utilization, if you can double server utilization via Solaris containers or VMWare, people don't buy fewer computers - they buy more.
OK, the message I get here is, virtualization technology is good.
"wow, this is a great idea... thank you, Sun. But hey, why are you guys here? I thought you built big expensive stuff that ran in banks?"
Ok, the message I get here is bad. Sun is still perceived as a provider of high cost products.
One of my short comings if it is one, would be that I have never looked at the cost of the product alone. The cost is everything hardware, software, services,cultural changes etc. it takes to solve the problem, change the way something is done for the best, or taking something to market. With such a broad portfolio of products and potential ways to offer a solutions to customers why does this perception still exist?
Listening to a lot of thoughts lately on future direction and the politics that come with that. My opinion is the way the choices are presented to the customer drives this perception. We have not always been about offering choice but, over time this has changed for the better. For example, with our Sun Ray technology we offer the choice for you to choose which desktop environment you will deliver to your end users. Solaris, Linux or Windows. Somewhere people stop listening to the customer, the right choices are not offered and therefore a perception is created.
Desktop Virtualization is a RED HOT topic. It has the promise to help customers drastically improve how they deliver and manage desktop environments for their end users. Virtualization is reaching the point where competition is building. Technology providers are starting to posture and customers are going to have to make choices. Will I virtualize my desktops or not? If I do, what approach will I take?
Lets assume you have some industry standard hardware and are going to virtualize your desktops. All things being equal, cost and performance, what choices will you make? I really want to hear what the customer thinks!
Poll A: What desktop OS will you virtualize?
Poll B: Given the choice of a bare metal Virtualization solution, where there is no underlying “Host OS” . Or Given the choice of a Virtualization solution where the “Host OS” is installed first, the hypervisor is part of the OS and “Guest OS's” are added on top. Which approach will you use?
Posted by ponderthis ( Dec 07 2006, 07:15:43 AM EST ) Permalink Comments [2]
Sunday December 03, 2006 Well the time has come and I could not wait any longer. I had to retire my Sun Cobalt Qube. I have few of them actually. I came to Sun just as they were acquiring Cobalt six years ago. As part of the new hire training there was a competition and I was one of three people, out of hundreds that won a Qube. I Believe it was one of the few things I have ever won. At the time, it was the best there was. It was the Professional Edition with dual drives for mirroring. After a memory upgrade, it has been my personal web server and firewall at home for six years. I loved the Cobalt appliances. The customers that used them were passionate about them as well. It really did everything it needed to do as a home appliance. I started to collected parts for it, shortly after Sun decided not to continue on with the products from Cobalt. Because I was successful and securing components. I have been able to survive drive failures along the way.
A few months back I started moving all my lab systems and personal systems over to VMserver and ESX, in an effort to simplify things, reduce power and to build an environment that supports most the work I am doing these days. At the same time, I started a personal blog for sharing my dog training, travels and hunting experiences as I am an avid hunter and outdoorsman. While looking for a blog platform I opted for pebble. Its great and offers exactly what I need. I simply moved all the Qube services over to JES running on Solaris 10 as a Virtual Machine and left the Qube as the firewall. I keep regular snapshots and backups of the Solaris 10 VM image. Now, the whole thing is a lot more simple to manage.
The last part was to replace was the firewall function. I just do not feel comfortable with the low-end broadband devices. Last week I stumbled across the new Zone Alarm device. I ordered one last week and finished setting it up this weekend. So far it is great. It actually is very, very simple to set up. It connected instantly to my service provider using PPPoE. That is a lot more than I can say for my Dlink. It has a great logging feature and also offers advanced services for an additional cost such as SPAM filtering and Antivirus scanning.
There are a few features I do not like. The unit only allows five external connections. This can however, be upgraded to 15. I was a little concerned with this at first but, whent with it. Having now used it, I am not that fond of how they track the five connections. Any device that has the default gateway set will register with the device. So, if it makes any outbound connection attempt such as a DNS query, it uses a license. The license seems to lock for two hours or until the device resets, or whichever comes first. The other feature I do not like is the wireless. The wireless can not be on the same network as the device. For example, the wireless network needs to be 192.168.2.0 and the firewall 192.168.1.0. I am sure this is for added security however, its a bit of a hassle. The add-on services for SPAM control and antivirus seem reasonable priced for a subscription price but, could be cheaper I think.
All in all, I like it a lot and its cheaper than the devices direct from Checkpoint/Sofaware, as well as others from Sonicwall etc.
Posted by ponderthis ( Dec 03 2006, 05:47:25 PM EST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Saturday December 02, 2006
Believe it or not, my wallet was found and returned to me. I can not believe it! At least not as fast as I got it back. It was in the mailbox on Saturday. I guess more people walk around in that area than I expected. It was found in the street and was in the general area I had looked. I am not sure how I missed it? Believe it or not, all the cash was there the Eros, US and Singapore dollars. All the credit cards were gone though.
The missing credit cards is what blows my mind. They were deactivated less than 30 minutes after loosing it. If you are going to take the cards why leave the cash? I understand the foreign currency, as its a hassle to convert. I am eager to know if anyone tries to use the cards especially with it being the holiday season. I will be sending a nice reward to the guy in Redwood who mailed it to me. I have done the same in the past an would do it again. I am a firm believer in what comes around goes around.
Friday December 01, 2006 Time for a post on the lighter side. It's always easier to blame misfortune as someone else's devious intention to harass you, rather than take responsibility for your own short comings or bizarre behaviors.
For example, several weeks ago at Immersion Week my good friend Thin Guy tried to accuse me of a few acts of devious behavior. First, he accused me of sending his room a 5:00AM wake-up call. Then he later tried to accuse me of stealing a personal item of his, that he is quite dependant upon. Now, this was all after he had spent the prior day looking for his missing wallet. Which by the way, was in his pants pocket the entire time. As we all know, this is a common coincidence with him.As Dr. Phil say's “ The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” Now that could apply to a lot that is going on lately.
Anyhow, I pulled a Thin Guy this week. After a great meeting with some of the best partners in Europe, I was making my way up the 101 to catch a flight. Following standard operating procedure I stopped at Broadway to fill up at the 76 station before returning the rental. That is when it happened, I pulled a hair brained stunt. My biggest pet peeve of all! I was talking on the cell phone when I should have been paying attention. I reached for my wallet, swiped my card, put it back in the wallet and sat it on the trunk! Why! Cause I needed to pump the gas and my other hand was busy holding the phone and not paying attention. So, somewhere out there on the 101 is my wallet. If anyone finds it an wants to send it back to me, please do so. You can keep the Singapore dollars that are in it for shipping! I wanted to blame Thin Guy for rubbing off on me but, I am just going to have to accept that this was my own fault.
In the meantime I have been rebuilding my identity, moving money around and building a fortress around me in hopes to protect myself. Fortunately, Thin Guy has been sending me the steps on protecting myself since he and his wife have already been through the process.
Posted by ponderthis ( Dec 01 2006, 03:16:20 PM EST ) Permalink Comments [1]