As I have mentioned in my previous entry, Andy presented some interesting facts during his keynote speech and one of them was "silent data corruption".

We all know bugs and errors do happen from applications down to the network layer.  However, we tend to think what's written to the disk is error-free and permanent.  Well...CERN did an interesting experiment (taken from Andy's slides) which proved otherwise:

• Wrote a simple application to write/verify 1 GB files
• Ran on 3000 rack servers with HW RAID card
• Over 3 weeks, 152 silent data corruption instances
• Previously thought “everything was fine”

Where did the errors come from ?  Any defect in disk, switch, controller, cable, driver, or firmware can corrupt data silently.  With ever-increasing use of data and storage, the silent data corrupt is going to become a fact of life.  So, how do we cope with this ?  This is where Sun's "ZFS" file system comes to rescue.   ZFS provides pooled storage with end-to-end data integrity:

• Completely eliminates the concept of volumes
  
• Does for storage what VM did for memory
• Everything is copy-on-write
  
• Uses 256-bit checksums per disk block
• Self-healing data on every read
• Transactional
  
• Disk scrubbing in background
• etc...
  

It basically creates "reliable storage out of unreliable components".

"Silent Data Corruption" is also briefly discussed during one of the innovation@sun podcast.

HPC Asia 2007 was held in Seoul Korea last week and Andy Bechtolsheim gave a keynote speech - "Scaling to PetaFlops".

There were some interesting ideas, facts, and data from the presentation which I will blog in future posts.

During our Q1 meeting, we had an interesting team building exercise - we were divided into teams where each was tasked to build a "Mars Surface Rover" (yes, actual working version).  The exercise was to measure the effectiveness of different type of leadership.

Each team was assigned with one of the following leader types:

• traditional leader - they are authoritative and controlling and do not have a great deal of trust in their subordinates' abilities.
  
• passive leader - they take the opposite view of traditional leaders.  They take employee empowerment to the furthest extreme.
  
• facilitative leader - they combine the best attributes of the passive and traditional leaders.  They give their team members plenty of room to do their job, but they know when to step in and supply input and guidance.
  

Of course the facilitative leader/team won out, but some people cried foul   Anyways... we really did have fun with this little exercise and it truely brought out teamwork and team building.  The following sequence of photos will tell you the story ...

p.s. Thank you Jade(our HR Business Partner) for suggesting this team building exercise !!

After reading Hal Stern's latest blog entry on importance of lens filter, I thought I would say a few words about photography   I am not, by any means, an expert in photography.  Although I want to be, I don't have the time for the dedication required to practice photography.

As you all know photography is more of an art than science, but in order for it to become an art, one must learn technology and science behind it first.  I am one of those occasional photo shooter who rely on equipments/technology as much as possible.

I remember somone asking why it is so hard to take good quality photos.  Some experts would say it all depends on type of available light.  Yes, that is true, but I would lean toward the following few resolutions from my limited knowledge:

• drop your bundled lens and buy an expense lens - there is reason why it's expensive.  I purchased Canon 24-105mm f4.0 L IS USM lens for my Canon 400D a couple weeks ago.  It's amazing how the quality of photos improved - trust me
• when you actually press the "shutter release button" to take a photo, you are unknowingly shaking the camera.  IS(Image stabilizer" lens does help here, but the best way to take a photo is to use tripod and release the shutter remotely.
• flash photography is difficult and you can never seem to get it right.  I found something which will dramatically improve your flash mode - Gary Fong's diffuser.  You will be amazed at the result.
  

As suggested by Hal, definitely use lens filter for protection, it's a must.  However, spend a bit more and don't buy the cheap UV filter.  Someone told me taking photos with a cheap UV filter is like shooting thru a dirty window

Photo from APAC GSE FY08 Q1 Meeting - with 24-105mm f4.0L IS USM lens and Gary Fong diffuser

It's been a year since the reformation of APAC GSE(Systems Engineering) group.  The size of extended staff has grown since then.  Like last year, we had our first quarterly meeting of the fiscal year in Seoul last Wed & Thurs.  We've discussed our priorities and goals for FY08.

It was very productve meeting as usual with a special invited guest John Bost - Storage Practice's CTO.  Thank you John for joining us to give storage update!!  We also had a unique team building exercise which was suggested by our HR Business Partner - Jade Chung(special dedicated blog on this on my next blog entry).

The meeting always need good team dinner.  Not to disappoint the guests, we had Korean BBQ as usual and a special tradition dinner with live Korean music & dance at Pulhyanggi(풀향기).


A group photo at Pulhyanggi taken with Shitamichi-san's(our Japanese Chief Technologist) Ricoh Caplio GX100

Which office is the most cleanest field office at Sun?  Well...among all the offices which I've had a chance to visit, Bangkok office is the winner so far.  It definitely deserves 5 stars - although the office is 5 years old, it's so well maintained.  I was really careful not to leave any dust behind.

I visited Bangkok office last week to meet with the pre-sales technical team and with customers.  I always enjoy talking to field engineers to understand how they work and what their concerns/issues are.  Due to the size of pre-sales technical community in Thailand, I took a bit of different approach in holding a townhall (or un-townhall) meeting.  We sat in a conference room with no specific agenda discussing various topics for a few hours - We had lunch brought in to the office and talked thru lunch.

I really enjoyed the visit and thank you Bangkok office for the hospitality.

Picture with a few Thailand SEs

Last month I gave "Sun's Vision & Why Sun ?" speech to a group of 16 college new hires thru Sun Korea's "Millennial Talent(MT)" program. 

All sixteen MTs went thru four stages of arduous testing, evaluation, and interview processes.  The competition was 170:1(applicants to position ratio) on average with most competitive position at 500:1.  New hires are among the brightest people I've met in recent years.  I am really glad they chose Sun and not our competitors.

Again, welcome MTs and thank you for making the right choice to join Sun!

p.s. I was about their age when I started at Sun 18 years ago - how time flies...

I tried very hard to hold off in buying a 3G phone, but I finally gave up. Yesterday I purchased Samsung SCH-M620(Ultra Messaging Smartphone, a.k.a. BlackJack) with SKT's 3G+ service.

Some of you may ask why I stayed with 2G for such a long time...well, in Korea, for 3G services, it requires a new number - a new prefix "010".  I just got lazy and didn't wanted to change my number which I had it for over 10 years.

Well...I just bit the bullet - there were more benefits than need for keeping my old number:

• For those of us not using 3G services have probably experienced where our phone do not roam everywhere.  With all the travelling I am doing, I really needed to have my mobile phone roam everywhere - my old 2G phone could not roam in Japan, Singapore, India, etc...
• Wireless e-mail service is not popular at all in Korea.  I didn't wanted to commit to Blackberry device and service which probably only has less than a thousand user base in Korea. With SKT's 3G+ service, IMAP e-mail feature is just an added value.
  
• It provides high speed Internet access thru HSDPA and direct access thru Wi-Fi if needed.
  
• I am not sure how useful this feature will be for me, but it also provides videophone service.
  

It's not perfect.  I had to give up DMB services (Digital TV) with this phone

Our fiscal year starts on July 1.  All countries or regions have GSS(Global Sales & Services) fiscal year kick-off event during July to communicate our plans for the year - Korea was the first to kick it off yesterday.

Here is a series of pictures from the event - pictures speak thousand words.

Big boss - Denis Heraud (APAC GSS Senior VP)


Sun Korea GEM President - Wonsik Yoo


Sun Korea Sales Team Performance


Sun Korea College Intern Performance


Sun Korea Internal Rock Band - SPARK


Sun Korea Internal Rock Band - SPARK

People ask you where you are going next.  When you tell them I am going to Phuket on a business trip, people give you a perplexed look.  I do have to agree "Phuket & business trip" are oxymoron.  Well...what can I say, it was all business.

Early this week, I was invited to a graduation of Asia South & India GEMs LDP(Leadership Development Program) to be a member of judging panel for participants' final projects.

LDP is a year long leadership development program which started in the beginning of FY07 to grow the SMI leadership talent for the current and future business opportinuties in Asia South & India.

The participants have gone through four strenous modules:

• Personal Motivation - individual profiling
• Competency Assessment - self-awareness MBTI, others perception 360 assessment, actual behavior development center
  
• Knowledge Acquisition - mini-MBA & project assignment
  
• Skills Workshop & Graduation

I and all the judges were very impressed with the dedicated and quality of work delivered by the participants/students of this program - good work everyone and thanks for your dedication in truely being interested in becoming leaders !!

Last week, I gave a customer presentation on "Throughput Computing & Virtualization".  The talk went along this line:

• Demand for Web 2.0 environment - threads
• How Sun's CMT(Chip Multithreading) technology addresses this demand - throughput computing
• It's not about CPU speed anymore, but throughput
• CMT creates another problem to solve - network I/O bottleneck
• How Sun's first & new multi-threaded 10GbE networking card addresses this challenge
• How hardware CMT(both CPU and NIC) are enabled by virtualization at different levels

Interestingly, at the same time our India GEM's CT(Chief Technlogist) Santhosh D'Souza posted an entry which compares IBM's POWER6 and Sun's CMT which you should read.

Interesting to note how IBM has gone from 2.2GHz to 4.7GHz, but performance went up only 1.4-1.45x and how they don't talk about power consumption of new POWER6.

Now you can carry files on a USB memory stick and edit them using Staroffice 8(a full-featured office productivity suite that's compatible with Microsoft Office) provided by inflight entertainment system on
Singapore Airlines.

The following pictures were taken by one of Sun Korea's OEM Software Sr. SEs - Kyunghan Kim.  He used Staroffice to edit his presentation file.

Last week was very busy for me in Tokyo:

• I held my extended Q4 staff meeting on Mon & Tues
• Wed thru Fri morning were Denis Heraud's(my boss) APAC GSS Q4 leadership meeting
• Fri afternoon was spent doing operation review of Japan's GSE team
  

I flew back Friday night to spend the weekend with my REAL bosses - my family.

It wasn't all business... Chris Barnes(our Australasia SE leader) kept us from going astray.  He kept us entertained thru out, especially on the first night by becoming our official "Samurai Dundee" - Thanks Chris !!

How about building your own X4500 with USB-Sticks and ZFS(Zettabyte File System) ?  Follow this video demo.  What a great little demo to showoff unmatched features of ZFS with Solaris 10!!!

Visit to Beijing last two days has been action packed.  Reviewed operations of 6 areas in Great China GEM, held townhall for Beijing based systems engineers, visited two very different customers, and had a very insightful lunch discussion with a former Sun employee who now works for Sun partner.

It was interesting to have very different types of discussion with two customers - traditional enterprise company(bank) and web 2.0 company(service provider).  Discussions again re-iterated points Greg Papadopoulos made about computing requirement for different set of customers.

A discussion with a former Sun employee over lunch was invaluable, especially when person is working for Sun partner.  These were unfiltered honest feedback about Sun from outside.  Thanks Tom.

Lastly, I was extremely fortunate to experience only "few days" a year clear/clean sky

Next week is our 12th annual JavaOne conference in San Francisco with over 15,000 developers to participate.  This year, heavy focus is on Java's unprecedented consumer impact.  Also, outside of the traditional Java platform discussions, Web 2.0 Scripting, AJAX, Services and Integration, open source and communities, and more will be discussed.

I couldn't resist posting an announcement from my neighborhood's 7-11 store in Seoul.

Last week, we announced a formation of SPARC busness unit within Sun - Microelectronics group.  And, an internal message regarding this announcment has been blogged by our CEO - how much more transparent can we be ? 

Really glad to see silicon investment again.  I am one of those old-timer at Sun who continuously think our SPARC and CMT technologies are undervalued.

There was a "defining moment" for me regarding SPARC and Sun.  It was back in Spring of 1989 when I was doing my graduate study at Stanford.  I was attending one of those industry seminar where Engineering School invites companies in Silicon Valley for an hour of technology talk.  Sun was invited to give a talk where Andy Bechtolsheim brought in SparcStation 1 (pizza box).  This was just when Sun was switching over from Motorola base 68xxx chip to SPARC.

Remember... this was back in 1989 and to see such technologies, not only the processor but how the Sparcstation was designed & built, was truely amazing.  When Andy lifted the cover of pizza box, audience jaws dropped ... you can imagine the rest.

I joined Sun a few months after as a software engineer, but unfortunately I didn't get to use Sparcstation 1 as my personal workstation until later time

It's one of those things you wish you started earlier.  I used to listen to mp3 music or podcast programs on my laptop and never really felt the need for an iPod.  Well...after having used it for a few months now, I can not live without it - I now completely understand this new iPod & podcasting culture.  Since I travel much more with my new job, iPod became a natural travelling companion keeping me company on the road especially in planes and airports.

Many communications & training programs at Sun are podcasted.  Two of my favorite ones are innovating@sun(external) & geekspeak(internal).  I also started wine studying(or tasting ) recently and wine for newbies podcasting is helping me tremendously.

You should really try the iPod, but more importantly experience the abundance of podcasts out there ...

Over the weekend, I cleaned and stored away my snowboard and boots.  This winter was exceptionally warm compared to previous years.  Although the weather and my free time didn't cooperate, I managed to go riding a few times this winter.  The pictures are from YongPyong resort in Korea where Sun Korea's SAC(Sun Activity Club) members went riding over the weekend in January.

After reading "Global warming sends a chill through winter sports" or related articles, you really begin to wonder about remaining days of outdoor skiing before our human race have to start relying on indoor slopes - what a pity.  However, there is no need to panic, they are still debating over the global warming theory.

Congratulations!!

Sun Korea has been selected as a preferred vendor to provide Massively Parallel Processing(MPP) for KISTI's fourth supercomputer project - 230 teraflops with AMD Opteron based servers.  It will be the largest in Asia.  More details to come ...

Last week, I was in Sydney attending APAC GSS(Global Sales & Services) Q3 staff meeting sponsored  by Denis Heraud(my boss).  Sydney is one of those cities where you can keep yourself entertained around the clock.

As a team building exercise, we decided to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  You can probably infer from the a set of pictures below that we started climbing during daylight and ended in darkness.  It was an over 3-hour experience with the following route:

In the beginning, I do have to admit, it was a bit tough/uneasy - especially from point 5 to 6.  However, once we got use to the height, wind, drizzle, and passed point 6, we were all experienced climbers.

I recommend everyone to do it!  It will be an unforgettable experience for you - start with daylight and end in darkness, where you will be  mesmerized by the beautiful skyline of Sydney Harbour.

Sun probably has one of the largest employee blogging community in the industry - even our CEO & General Counsel blog.  As of yesterday, we have an addition to the blogging community - Sun Korea GEM(Geographically Established Market) President - Wonsik Yoo (유원식사장) has joined the participation age.  If I am not mistaken, he may be the first of 16 GEM presidents to blog...Welcome !!

Last week, we held our annual analyst summit.  Greg Papadopoulos, our CTO, gave an excellent presentation about how IT market is diverging and discussed computing requirement explosion in different market  segments - Redshift.  This is a must see presentation if you work in IT industry.  This will give a very high-level view on where computing is headed from "systems" perspective.

Enjoy!

Remember when TIME magazine selected "you" as the person of the year in 2006.  This was about people who contribute "user generated/created content(UCC)".  With advance in technology, everyone now is a writer, a director, & a producer.  This is inconceivable without personal camcorders, easy-to-use video editing software, but mostly importantly without audience/community such as youtube.

Here are some interesting UCC from youtube:

• Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us from Dan Berg's blog
• Web 2.0 - this is a bit old
• A Few Good Expenses - this is funny, but you had to seen the original movie "A Few Good Men"

I've been tagged by GSE Divas which reminds me of a "chain letter" I received when I was a child.  Now I need to reveal 5 things about myself and tag 5 more people.

1. California Earthquakes - do you remember these earthquakes in California during past two decades?

1989 Loma Prieta (San Francisco)                                              1994 Northridge (Los Angeles)



I was in both.  The first one ...I was working in Sun office in Palo Alto when it happened.  The second, I was visiting my parent in Northridge.  Some people actually blamed me for the second one.


2. Thyroid Cancer - back in 1999 we were having our first child, I was dignosed with thyroid cancer. I went thru surgery to removed my thyroid glands.  The prognosis is so good some people don't even consider it as cancer, however, it did have an everlasting impact on our lives.


3. What's with the name - there is another person in Sun Korea office who has exactly the same name as mine(오세창).  He also uses exactly the same English spelling for his name.  You can imagine the confusion this can cause in our e-mail system, right?  We managed for him to use a different variation of English spelling to eliminate the potential mess.  However, we still do have e-mails that cross.

My last name is somewhat unusual in U.S., right ?  Not in my Junior High School which I attended in North Hollywood, California during late 1970's.  There were 6 students with last name "Oh" and there weren't many Koreans in this school - Americans probably thought all Koreans had last name of "Oh".

One other interesting fact about my last name.  In Chinese character it writes "吳".  The same last name exists in Japanese as "Go", in Cantonese as "Ng", and in Mandarin as "Wu"


4. JPL/Galileo - as a college intern back in 1985, I worked at JPL(Jet  Propulsion  Lab) in  Pasadena Califonia for about 6 month working on a Telemetry System on Galileo spacecraft missioned to Jupiter.  This project lasted over 20 years until Galileo's mission ended in 2003.


5. Korean Solaris - I started my life at Sun in 1989 as a software engineer responsible for Korean  Solaris.  Back then it was called SunOS and with SunView and OpenLOOK window systems.  It seemed like yesterday, but we were the pioneers of internationalization(I18N) & Localization(L10N) in 80's & 90's.

Now it's time for me tag...I think I will get my Chief Technologists In APAC active:  Ken Pepple, Shitamichi-san(already tagged),  MJ Sim,  Santhosh D'Souza, & Sutum Chaiyawat.

I spent all of last week in Sydney visiting our SE team in ANZ and also conducting Q3 APAC SE leaders meeting.  It was an unusually busy week with many other meetings being held at the same time.

I barely missed experiencing 42C (that's about 108F) heatwave with out of controlled bush fires which all happened a day before I arrived in Sydney.  Some of Sun employees returned home from work to safeguard their houses from bush fires.  As you may know, when I left Seoul it was about 0C degrees.  So, I moved from underground parking from my apartment to airport's underground parking to avoid wearing winter clothes

Sydney is only 2 hours ahead of Seoul (daylight savings in ANZ).  You know what!  This caused one of the most difficult to adjust jetlag for first couple of days sleeping at 3AM and waking  up for work at 7AM.  It seemed worst than going to U.S., or maybe it's just an expectation issue...

Anyways, it was great to meet many of ANZ SEs for the first time - yes, it was long overdue.  The trip to ANZ has been postponed twice due to various reasons, but it was worth the wait because we had the best meetings yet to date.  Maybe it was the "Aussie" effect, but I also welcome good news anytime while I am on the road - 3cents in Q2.

While I was there, I met with all the new SE managers who recently joined us - welcome Paul, Allen, & Robynne!

Lastly, Chris...thanks for your hospitality.  You were a GREAT host!


ANZ SE Management Team

There are times when good things happen when you least expect them.  This was the case with this book.  I was so busy in an airport trying to make a connecting flight, but couldn't  board the plane without something to read - I just hate watching those on-board movies on a small screen.  I picked up the first book that came into my sight at a book store and was pleasantly surprised! 

Some of these topics maybe a bit strange to compare or analyse:

• What do school teachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common ?
• What do estate agents and the Ku Klux Klan(KKK) have in common ?
• Why do drug dealers still live with their moms ?
• What makes a perfect parent ?
• How can your name affect how well you do in life ?

However, Freakonomics (translated version is 괴짜 경영학) by Steven Levitt answers these questions by discovering a totally new way of seeing the world.

This is an excerpt from the book:

As Levitt(the most brilliant young economist in America) sees it, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions.  His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions.  For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers?  Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?  What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade?  Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at heart?  Wht do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects?    Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards?  Is sumo wrestling corrupt? ...

Enjoy!

The trip I made to Bangalore(India) in December, in spite of being an experienced traveller,  was one of the most difficult trips due to schedules/routes .  There simply was no direct flight from Seoul to Bangalore.  When this happens you have to exhaust all possibilities for an optimal schedule/route.  This isn't a difficult problem but it becomes nuisance in trying to figure out which option to bet on.

Well...the choice I've made wasn't the best - due to flight delays and extra long layovers.  I ended up spending most of time on the road instead of in meetings.

However, the visit to India was very productive.  Due to the size of the SE(Systems Engineering) team, I was able to meet most of SEs and was able to have candid discussions about varing topics.  Open discussions with practice leads and Sales also gave a new insight into well-run operation in Sun India.

And, it's always good to know a new fact - between Mitesh Agarwal & Santhosh D'souza from India SE team, they are the biggest contributors to "onestop" - soon to be in "cepedia".

Last, but not least, we now have a new SE manager in India - Divyesh Shah.  Welcome Divyesh!  A special thanks goes to Anil Valluri for acting for past 2 quarters and building up the SE team in India for past many years.  Anil will be spending all his time now with his full-time job of running Services Practice in India.  Thanks again Anil!

First serious snow in Seoul last night ...

Sun Korea conducted a mini CEC - a follow up to last October's  CEC(Customer Engineering Conference) in San Francisco .  The event was held for a day with selected 15 technical sessions from the original CEC.

In addtion to Sun engineers, partner engineers were invited for a full day of latest technology updates.  Yes, presenters/instructors were engineerings who attended original CEC.