Marc Hamilton's Weblog

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 x4440, the first and only 4 socket AMD quad core server in a 2 RU chassis. Need more than 16 threads, then maybe the Sun Fire T5140, packing two eight core UltraSPARC T2 Plus CPUs with 128 threads in 1 RU is what you need. These are all tremendously powerful servers and have seen great customer adoption in the short time since their release. Of course Sun's education customers in the US are snapping up the eight core Sun Fire x2200 m2 which thanks to the US Education Essentials Matching Grant is discounted from the regular list price of $2815 to $1126. We remember we didn't have much money when we went to school either and don't think student's tuition should go to buying high over priced or out of date servers. But the product line that is getting some of the biggest increases, percentage wise, in customer interest is our most powerful server, the M9000.

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  |  Comments[0]

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]

The Year of Open Storage

If you click on the "Resources" tab on the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid User Portal you will quickly notice that TACC's Ranger supercomputer has 2x the CPU power, 2x the memory, and 2x the storage of the previous 17 NSF TeraGrid funded systems combined. This rapid advance in supercomputer power has been enabled, in part, by open computing. The Ranger system uses the same AMD Opteron quad core CPUs that you will very shortly be able to buy from every major vendor, the same type of memory that goes into over 7 million x64 servers a year, and disk drives that are sold by the millions, all used in conjunction with open source software like Sun Grid Engine which allows a single compute job to be used by 16 or 16,000 or more of Ranger's approximately 60,000 processor cores. While the more powerful blade servers in Ranger's Sun Blade 6048 chassis cost slightly more, you can buy similar technology from Sun starting from around $1000 such as our Sun Fire x2100. Even computer companies much larger than Sun that make supercomputers based on non industry standard processors and closed-source software can't possibly compete on price because they will never have the volumes that AMD or Intel have with their x64 processors. That is why 406 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world are based on the same cluster architecture as Ranger and a similar number of the top 500 are based on Intel or AMD x64 CPU architectures.

So what does that have to do with Open Storage? Storage, including many of Sun's own Storagetek products as well as storage products from virtually all major storage vendors have been based on commodity disk drives, like the ones used in Ranger, but built into proprietary storage arrays, that ran non open source software, and used other proprietary components. Sun's Thumper x4500 storage server (the ones that delivery to Ranger over 35 GB/second using the Sun Lustre file system and 72 low cost arrays with 1.7 PB of capacity) was the first in a new breed of open storage devices, combining the same commodity CPU, memory, and disk drives used in clusters and in fact your everyday server like the x2100. Just how low cost is the x4500? Well, if you are an eligible academic institution, you can buy a 48 TB x4500 for under $25,000 in the US via the Sun Education Essentials Matching Grant Program. Sorry, commercial customers pay a bit more, but we all remember what it was like to be a starving student. So what's next with Open Storage.

The next evolution in Open Storage will be driven by software. Rather than running limited functionality proprietary software, the x4500 run's the open source Solaris operating system. We've created an entire Open Storage Community around Open Solaris, so anyone can write new storage features and quickly and easily deliver them to a wide user base. Or vica versa, you could develop a new storage device and use our Open Storage software to drive it, without writing a single line of your own code. This week, we made another major contribution to the Open Storage community by delivering on our pledge to open source Sun's SamFS and QFS software. This is the software that lets TACC backup Ranger's 1.7 PB of storage to several multi-PB Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular tape libary systems. If you are not familiar with SamFS or QFS, read Margaret's Blog to understand the importance of this latest open source project.

So with an ever growing collection of Open Storage Software available to Sun StorageTek engineers to work with (and since it is open source, engineers from other storage companies too) I predict we will see a dramatic change in range of storage products entering the market this year. It took nearly a decade from the time the first open source cluster system made its way onto the Top500 list to reach the 80%+ share that clusters have today. How long will it take for 80% of the world's storage to reside on new classes of open storage devices? My guess, much less than 10 years. That is because storage capacity has been growing even faster than compute capacity. And just like there is no way that the NSF could have afforded to pay 2x or even 1x what it paid for the last 17 TeraGrid systems combined for Ranger, there is no way that TACC or Facebook or Bank of America can afford to keep all the data they will generate in the coming years on traditional, proprietary, high cost storage devices.

Congrats to the SamFS and QFS team on their Open Source release, and welcome to the new world of Open Storage.

Posted at 09:48PM Mar 20, 2008 by marchamilton in General  |  Comments[1]

2008 Education Essentials Matching Grant Program

Ever wonder why schools tend to have out of date computer equipment for their students? It isn't always lack of money. Often, part of the problem is vendors who try to dump outdated equipment on schools for a "bargain" price. Of course, thanks to Moore's law, selling last year's model for 30% off, when current models are 2x as fast, isn't really a bargain, is it? Especially when you have to pay to power and cool the system. At Sun, we think every student should have access to the latest hardware, so once again we are running our Education Essentials Matching Grant Program.

The Education Essentials Matching Grant Program is definitely not a program to dump outdated equipment. Qualifying educational institutions can purchase our latest, most power efficient servers like the T5120 with the latest Niagara 2 processor. The T5120, with powerful virtualization features like LDOMs and Solaris Containers is the perfect platform for teaching. A single T5120 can be divided up into dozens of LDOMs and/or Solaris Containers without paying for expensive third party virtualization software, giving each student in a class a virtual OS environment which appears like its own server, right down to being able to reboot independent of other OS images running on the server.

Want an x86 server instead, the Education Essentials Matching Grant Program has servers with the latest Intel quad core Xeon processors as well as the latest AMD Opteron systems. And if you need a larger SPARC based server, the newest SPARC M4000 and M5000 servers are available too in this program. But as they say in sales, don't wait, the Education Essentials Matching Grant Program ends in June.

Posted at 05:50PM Mar 16, 2008 by marchamilton in General  | 

TACC Quarterly NSF Review

I'm sitting at the National Science Foundation's quarterly review of Ranger which is now in full production (hint, click on the "Resources" tab). I walked through the amazingly compact data center again early this morning. If a supercomputer can be called beautiful, Ranger is certainly that. What is probably most amazing are the science results that have already been achieved in the first few months of use which several users have presented. But the numbers themselves are also amazing. Ranger has already amassed over 135 TB of data on its Sun Lustre file systems. The largest Lustre filesystem has a capacity of over 800 TB of user accessible space, can store over 470 million individual files (470M inodes), and file system metadata alone takes up 2 TB. More later, but turning back to the next speaker now.

ps, you probably want to know if Ranger passed the full system HPL (Linpack) benchmark of the Top500 list. I'm not going to tell you what the exact results were, you will have to ask TACC, but I am happy to say Ranger passed the HPL target specified in the NSF acceptance tests.

Posted at 12:38PM Mar 05, 2008 by marchamilton in General  |  Comments[1]

TACC Ranger Dedication Video

Posted at 09:16PM Feb 23, 2008 by marchamilton in General  |  Comments[3]

New Sun Blade x8450

Sun today announced our newest 4-socket Sun Blade x8450, a no compromises 4-socket blade with 4 quad core Intel Xeon processors and 32 DIMM memory slots. Besides the official product pages, you should also check out the unofficial Sun Blade Blog. This 16 core powerhouse provides all of the performance you would expect from an industry leading 4-socket rack mount server like our 2RU x4450, only in a blade form factor. Sun is the only vendor to provide a 4 socket Intel Xeon quad core server in both a 2RU and a blade form factor. More reasons than ever to choose Sun as your x64 supplier!

Posted at 12:23PM Feb 20, 2008 by marchamilton in General  |  Comments[1]

More Ranger Facts and Figures

There are more details on TACC's Ranger system here, but some of the highlights worth sharing:

Ranger Goes Live

Ranger, the first Sun Constellation System to go into full user production, is now fully up and running at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Take a look at the NSF TeraGrid User Portal and click on the "Resources" tab to view a live system monitor of the NSF Teragrid resources. With 62976 CPU cores, 504 peak TFlops, 123 TBytes memory, and 1730 TBytes disk, Ranger provides more CPU, memory, and disk resources to NSF TeraGrid users than all other 18 TeraGrid systems!

Posted at 06:06AM Feb 06, 2008 by marchamilton in General  | 

Sun Blade of the Month Club

Most of Sun's HPC customers know the SunBlade 6048

as the compute engine at the core of the Sun Constellation System, the world's first open, petascale compute system. But lots of our other customers are also catching on that the SunBlade 6048 is not just a great HPC compute server but a great general purpose blade platform. One customer recently purchased several SunBlade 6048s for a SunRay server. Well, actually, to serve about 1500 SunRays.

I've already had several customers ask me since last week's announcement that Sun is purchasing MySQL what the best MySQL server is. While MySQL powers 1000's of web sites small and large around the world, the customers I typically meet need at least 48 servers. So why not use a 6048? I've even recommended to marketing that we start a "blade of the month" club, i.e. buy a SunBlade 6048 and each month receive a box in the mail with 4 new blades, which you can return at no charge if you are not fully satisfied. Sort of like an ongoing try-and-buy program. You could start off today with a few two socket Intel blades, get a box of Niagara 2 based SPARC blades next month, and load up on the quad core Opteron blades being used in the Sun Constellation System at TACC when they become generally available.

Posted at 02:14PM Jan 22, 2008 by marchamilton in General  |  Comments[2]

Dell vs HP and SunBlade 6000

Apparently Dell figured they could sneak up on companies like Sun who are closed today in the US to celebrate Martin Luther King day and decided this was the day they should release their new blade platform. The Register's Ashlee Vance had a field day comparing Dell's new blade chassis to the nearly two year old HP c-class blade. I guess if you are two years behind the competition, you pick a quite day to introduce your new product. Maybe it is Dell's new found love for Solaris, but their web site seems to focus on comparing their new blade with an almost identical offering from HP and IBM's blade. Couldn't find a mention of the SunBlade 6000. Of course, Dell's new blade does have half the memory, half the CPUs, half the disks that the SunBlade 6000 can pack in the same 10 RU of space, but that is not all it's missing, it also comes up short with no RAID5/6, no SAS backplane and no storage blade. The claims of power savings over HP and IBM are certainly eco conscious, however few details on what configs were compared. I am sure IBM and HP will have a field day responding. Since AMD and Intel have both introduced a number of lower power processors in the last two years, it is easy to claim power savings if you use different CPUs. Of course just for fun, I went ahead and configured one of Dell's new blades on their web site, and received an estimated ship date of March 10.

Can't wait until March 10th to get your blade, don't despair, you can get a SunBlade 6000 shipped to you in a few days. You don't even have to buy it. Use our try and buy program, and you can keep the system for 60 days, and return it at no charge if you don't decide to buy it. We even pay the return shipping. If you do buy the same exact system we sent you to try, Sun will even give you an extra 25% off. Versus fabricated eco power savings claims, encouraging our customers to buy their trial units versus shipping them the exact or similar config actually save energy, although the shipping companies aren't too happy with the program. Who knows, after 60 days, Dell may even be shipping their blades with a little shorter lead time. As long as you don't mind getting by with half the CPU, memory, and disks, the Dell blade doesn't seem too bad, and should give look-alike HP a run for their money. But do have your credit card ready if you call Dell, so far, Sun's try and buy program is one of the few things they haven't tried to copy.

Posted at 11:51AM Jan 21, 2008 by marchamilton in General  |  Comments[7]

New Sales and Technical Positions Opening

As you saw yesterday, Sun continues to grow. This growth is creating a number of new opportunities for top notch sales people and technical architects within the Americas Systems Practice. I'm managing a pretty big team now and can't list all the openings I have, but here are a few of my higher priority ones:

I Love The Letter M

I've always loved the letter M, so much so I have two of them in my name. Now everyone at Sun has something to love about M, as in the M in AMP, better know as MySQL. Read Jonathan's Blog for more info on our announcement to acquire MySQL, one of the world's most popular open source databases. After the acquisition closes, Sun will add MySQL to the long list of open source software, including Solaris, which we sell support subscriptions for. Like Solaris, MySQL will remain free and open source, but customers who need world class enterprise support for MySQL will be able to purchase support subscriptions from Sun, just like they can today for Solaris.

A few of my regular blog readers have emailed me asking why I have not posted for several weeks, so here you go. First, I did manage to take some vacation with the family, and enjoyed some New Year's skiing in Mammoth, with eight feet of snow in three days! Now that was skiing. Secondly, I've started a new job at Sun. Yes, after launching Solaris 10 Update 4, two releases of Solaris Express, Project Indiana and the OpenSolaris Developer Preview, signing up OEMs Dell and IBM, and launching our virtualization platform xVM, I decided to move back to the field from my job running Solaris Marketing. I'm now leading up the Americas Systems Practice in our Global Sales Organization, responsible for all systems sales in the US, Canada, and Latin America. So while I'm not in the software group anymore, I still am so happy to hear the MySQL announcement. I'm coming into the job at a great time. Our momentum, as shown by our preliminary Q2 profit and growth numbers announced today, continues to do great. And while the software team needs to wait for the acquisition to close to sell MySQL subscriptions, I have a whole line of SPARC and x64 servers I can sell today to run MySQL on. But don't worry, I promise to find time to keep blogging.

Posted at 09:51AM Jan 16, 2008 by marchamilton in General  | 

End of Year Reading

I'm enjoying the week off and even managed to get in a little reading. A dear friend gave me Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe - A Quantum Computer Scientists Takes on the Cosmos. No, you don't have to be a computer scientist to enjoy it, not quite an Eve Diamond mystery but helps explain other types of mysteries. Proving quantum mechanics doesn't have to be boring, MIT professor Lloyd shows computer scientists can have a bit of humor,

"My senior colleagues in the Mechanical Engineering Department complain that the incoming freshmen have never used a screwdriver. This is untrue. Fully half of them have used a screwdriver to install more memory in their computers."

Just before Christmas I finished a totally different type of book, Mariane Pearl's A Mighty Heart, the story about the life and death of her husband, Danny Pearl, murdered in Pakistan in 2002. After reading Mariane's detailed account of the weeks following her husband's kidnapping, one can clearly envision the conditions that led to the tragic assassination last week of Benazir Bhutto.

So with that, I wish everyone a safe and happy New Year, and I'll be back next year with more Sun blogs.

Posted at 08:15AM Dec 31, 2007 by marchamilton in General  | 

DTrace Summit

As announced in Bryan Cantrill's blog, the first DTrace Summit will be held in San Francisco on March 14, 2008. What is the DTrace Summit? As Bryan told me, "the only requirement -- in true unconference fashion -- is that all participants be prepared to talk on what they're doing with DTrace. So it's very hands-on in that regard". Apparently a lot of people are interested, as over 50 folks have signed up on the conference wiki in only a few days. No matter if you are an experienced DTrace user or just trying it out for the first time, if you are interested in DTrace you don't want to miss this unconference. Bryan and the other original developers of DTrace are all attending and this promises to be an amazing day of learning about DTrace for users of all experience levels.

Posted at 01:54PM Dec 20, 2007 by marchamilton in General  | 

Sun Campus Ambassador Programs

One of my favorite groups of Sun employees are the 500 Sun Campus Ambassadors. This program started four years ago with a handful of student interns and has grown significantly each year, and we are working today on plans to expand further in 2008. It has been a long time since I was a college student, so it is great to have this sounding board of young, cool, hip students to bounce ideas off of. The campus ambassador job is fairly simply, they are paid to learn about Sun open source technology and to hold campus events to introduce that technology, including OpenSolaris, NetBeans and OpenSPARC to fellow students and professors.

The campus ambassador program is global, take a look at this map of Sun Campus Ambassadors in India to get an idea of where some of our campus ambassadors are located. As I said, we are making plans to expand the program in 2008, so if are a college student who might be interested, check out our Student Zone page to apply.

If you are interested in a Solaris specific internship job, there are a number of Solaris engineering and marketing student intern jobs open. If you are interested, search for intern job openings or jump directly to some of our Solaris marketing student intern jobs including this technical marketing intern and this MBA student intern opening.

Posted at 09:51AM Dec 20, 2007 by marchamilton in General  | 

How Much Are You Paying For Your Database?

Allen Packer's recent blog titled, Are Proprietary Databases Doomed?, talks about the new challenges to traditional proprietary commercial databases by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. I'd like to point out that every free copy of Solaris 10 ships with optimized versions of both PostgreSQL and MySQL, along with JavaDB. Still, while I agree with many of the points in Allen's blog, there are plenty of commercial applications (many owned by the database vendor) that have, in effect, hardcoded ties to a commercial database, so I'm not too worried about those commercial databases being doomed. Sun spends a tremendous amount of effort working with both Oracle and IBM DB2 to ensure they run great on the Solaris platform, both on SPARC and x86.

Yet if you are not locked into a commercial database, it is hard to ignore the world record performance of PostgreSQL running on Solaris. Maybe that is why it is hard to find a startup these days that is writing big checks to Oracle. If you want commercial support for your database, Sun's PostgreSQL support starts at only $1596/year. Why should you turn to Sun for your PostgreSQL support? Well for one, we use it ourselves in many Sun products that require a high performance database, like Sun xVM, so you can be sure we work hard to optimize and support it.

We are also seeing PostgreSQL turn up in more and more ISV solutions. Greenplum for instance, uses PostgreSQL as the basis for their revolutionary data warehouse appliance (which happens to be based on Solaris and ZFS). One recent customer which evaluated Greenplum versus traditional commercial data warehouse solutions found that the energy cost savings alone of a Greenplum solution running on Sun's Thumper storage server paid for the cost of the software in the first year! So maybe the question should be not how much do you pay for your database, but how much power can you save with a more efficient database?

Posted at 11:08AM Dec 13, 2007 by marchamilton in General  | 

New Sun xVM Blueprint

And for those of you who want a more in depth technical look at xVM, check out this Sun xVM Blueprint.

This blueprint provides a comprehensive examination of hardware virtualization, particularly as it applies to Sun platforms and Sun xVM Server. It explores the underlying hardware architecture and software implementation. Great emphasis has been placed on the CPU hardware architecture limitations for virtualizing CPU services and their software workarounds, with details on the software architecture for implementing three types of virtualization: CPU virtualization, Memory virtualization, and I/O virtualization.

Posted at 01:13PM Dec 06, 2007 by marchamilton in General  |