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 ...

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 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

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!

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.







 

Sun Korea held "x64 Partner Advantage Network Day" seminar yesterday to recruit new partners for our x64 based Galaxy servers.

X86 server market is one of the fastest growing segment in Korea where Sun has great opportunities with a new line of X64 based products.  However, as we all know, great products do not become successful by themselves.  We need great people selling them.  In this case, we need right channels/partners to drive these products.

In low-margin & extremely competitive x86 server market, the channel is the key to success.  Sun Korea has recognized it and making investment to select the best partners who understand, have record of success, and can become influencial in x86 market.

I visited Asia South GEM a couple weeks ago.  I stopped by Singapore's Sun Solution Center(SSC) for a tour and pictures with our SEs.  I must say the SSC setup was more than impressive.  It was spacious with separate POC rooms, presentation rooms with theater style seats, HD monitors, internet enabled cameras for remote monitoring, built-in remote call-in enable audio systems, etc...  Simply, it was a state-of-art.

Wth all the hi-tech setup,  what impressed me the most was the fact that SSC was funded equally by Singapore government, our partners, and Sun - the best way to have SSCs up & running.


 

I just finished reading Beyond Java by Bruce Tate.  Although, I don't fully agree with assessments being made in the book about of Java, it was very interesting and disruptive read indeed.

Java moving from client side(applet) to server side(servlet), it built up credibility for being enterprise strength programming language.  However, with all things it comes with a price - added complexity.  Although I personally don't believe it's Java's fault as a programming language.  It's issues with framework or developement environments.

The author introduces a language which is better than Java in doing certain simple things especially on client side - Ruby language and more specifically Ruby on Rails.

If you are not biased toward any languages & interested in computer programming languages, it is a good way to get different perspective on programming languages, Java, and Web2.0 languages(if you want to call it that).

Enjoy!

Please take a look at what Sun has announced today - Project Blackbox.  It's amazing how innovation never seems to end at Sun.  It's a virtualized "data center" to go - a transportable data center.  It can be used in a variety of scenarios.  Rather than giving you details here, please read the specs and view pictures which speak thousand words.

I am back home from CEC event in San Francisco last week.  It was great feeling to reconfirm that field engineering community is alive & well.  The main theme for the conference was "The Geeks are Back!" with 3 key messages:

• Join the Team
• Tell the Story
• Inspire & Thrill

During 3 days, we had numerous keynote sessions from Jonathan Schwartz, Gregory Papadopoulos, Andy Bechtolsheim, David Yen, John Fowler, Don Grantham, etc. and over 200 technical sessions.  It was an assurance on how Sun is committed to Customer Engineering(Field Engineering) community, how Sun is growing relative to competitions, and how Sun's product line is better than ever.  As someone said, there is no reason why Sun can't grow again.

Now on to my wedding anniversity topic which I briefly mentioned during my last post... Unfortunately my wedding anniversity date fell during CEC conference which I forgot completely.  The good thing about the situation was my wife also forgot about it.  However, as you know good things never last, my wife's credit card company sent her SMS congratulating her.  The rest, I will leave it up to your imagination   I bragged about my credit card company's service on one of my posts.  I never thought being over-serviced will have negative consequences...

On a side note, we had a very interesting conversation with our taxi driver one night.

I stole a picture from GSE Divas which was taken during Don Grantham's panel discussion.

Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) has started in San Francisco Moscone Center.  This is Sun's annual conference for field engineers where 3000 engineers are attending.

I had the honor to host APAC State of the Union last night where close to 500 engineers attended.  It was a full house & engineers stayed for full 2 hours to be updated on activities in APAC.  Special thanks to Jeya Kumar, Marc Hamilton, Waymon Whiting, Anthony Lee for speaking on behalf of their respective practices and functions.

I also presented GSE(Global Systems Engineering) on behalf of Hal Stern this morning during Don Grantham's kick-off keynote session where over 3000 engineers participated.  It's impossible to sit-in for Hal in terms of both intelligence & size   But I managed to survive.

Special apologize and gratitude are in order for my wife.  Yesterday was my wedding anniversity which I complete forgot.  Guys out there...you know this is a bad thing...more on this incident in later blogs.

To be continued...

A couple days ago, I gave a keynote speech "We are the dot in Web2.0" during Sun Korea's "New Product Launch" event.

The three basic characteristics of Web2.0 are "participation, sharing, open".  There is no other company in the industry who does this better than Sun.  We not only open & share our technology to promote participation by building communities, but we are transparent in our business process & policy.  E.g., we recently disclosed our policy on stock options and our "CEO Among the Few Chiefs Who Blog".

The basic technologies & programs which I covered during my talk was:

• UltraSPARC T1
• OpenSPARC
• Solaris
• OpenSolaris
• Java EE 5
• JRuby teanm joining Sun
• World's First Hybrid Server - X4500
• SunFire T1000 & T2000
• Try & Buy Program
• Reference to "Save Energy, Save Money, Save the Planet"  PG&E rebate program in U.S.

People may have different definitions & opinions about Web 2.0 technologies and environment.  But, one thing is consistent - it has evolved significantly since the first introduction where our usage has changed from "download" to "contribution" culture.  Sun, ever since the company was founded, was always sharing.  You can call it Web2.0 or Web3.0...particiaption/sharing/open is in Sun's DNA.

Yesterday, I had a chance to present Sun's vision to SunSTAR interns during newhire orientation session.  Although I have been presenting Sun's vision for past 3 years to new SunSTARs, it never gets dull and always learn something new.

The presentation usually goes something like this...(sorry this is in Korean) which I wrote in a customer newsletter sometime ago:

우리나라는 이제 초고속인터넷, 무선영역, 그리고 전반적인 IT영역에서 세계 최고 선진국수준으로 발전하였습니다.그러나 이 지구상에는 아직도 약 56억 명의 인구는 컴퓨터와 인터넷의 혜택을 누리지 못하고 있습니다. 이른바 디지털 양극화 현상이(Digital Divide) 존재하고 있습니다.

썬의 비전은 "모든 사람과 모든 사물이 네트워크에 참여한다" (Everyone and everything participating on the network) 입니다. 사람과 사물이 네트워크에 단순히 연결되는 것 뿐만 아니라 적극적으로 참여한다는 뜻입니다. 그래서 네트워크상에서 정보를 창조하고, 교환하고, 거래하고, 소비하고, 서로 가르치고 공유하게 됩니다. 이제 이 세상은 단순 정보의 시대에서 참여의 시대(Participation Age)로 급속히 변화하고 있습니다.

이런 변화 속에 썬의 사명이 존재합니다. "참여의 시대에 힘을 실어주는 기술을 창조하고 커뮤니티를 활성화하는 일" (To create the technologies and fuel the communities that power the Participation Age) 입니다.  우리는 참여의 시대를 가까운 미래에 가능케 할 것이고 이러한 것은 참여를 유도하는 커뮤니티를 지원하는 일뿐만 아니라 그 기술적인 측면에서의 혁신을 통해 이룬다는 것이 썬의 기본 계획 입니다.

썬의 기본전략은 아주 명확합니다. "커뮤니티가 시장을 만들어낸다"는 것입니다. 우리는 커뮤니티가 활성화되면 그것이 곧 시장 또는 수요를 만들어낸다고 굳게 믿습니다. 이것은 썬이 가지고 있는 혁신적인 기술을 과감히 공유함으로써 이루어집니다. 예를 들면, JCP (Java Community Process : 자바관련 표준의 진화를 만들어내는 협업절차), OpenOffice (마이크로소프트의 Office에 필적하는 썬의 사무용소프트웨어 공개판), OpenSolaris (전세계에서 가장 진화된 UNIX의 공개판), OpenSPARC (가장 진화된 RISC cpu기술의 공개판)과 같은 노력을 의미합니다.

결과적으로 썬은 다음 세가지에 집중하고 있습니다. 첫째, 고객들이 안고 있는 가장 크고 어렵고 복잡한 문제에 관한 해결책을 만들어냅니다. 둘째, 우리의 해결책을 공유함으로써 커뮤니티를 활성화하고 참여를 증대 시키고 디지털 양극화를 극복하는 여러 기회를 만들어냅니다. 셋째, 세계에서 가장 훌륭한 참여의 인프라스트럭쳐를 만들고 운영합니다.

이러한 썬의 전략은 분명 여러분들의 비즈니스의 중요한 열쇠가 될 것이라 확신하고 여러분의 파트너로 함께 성장하고 발전하기를 기대합니다.

I spent all last week visiting Japan & Beijing.  The weather was hot & discomforting.  But, enthusiasm of people I met was most encouraging and hotter than the weather.

I had the privilege to attend and give an opening speech at Sun Japan's SE kick-off meeting.  More than expected crowd turned up with all ears.  Great visit in understanding overall Japan's operation and engaging with great people.

Sun Japan SE kick-off meeting

When I visited Beijing, I was greeted by overwhelming changes to the city (it has been a while since I last visited) and more changes on its way for 2008 Olympics - did you know the opening ceremony is on 2008/08/08 ? (maybe 8 o'clock )  I really do feel for the athletes...it's going to be the hottest time of the year in Beijing.

Anyways...in addition to meeting great folks in Sun Beijing office, I had a chance to visit Sun's ERI(Engineering & Research Institute).  It was a very impressive set-up with hundreds of software engineerings doing research and development work directly connected to headquarter groups.

Another enlightening encounter was with a long time Sun China's partner TeamSun.  It's always amazing to know how two companies can have such a solid relationship for over 20 years - marriages don't even last that long these days

When you are on the road, going from a place to place physically exhausted, it a tremendous moral boost to hear a such good news  "Sun gaining market share".  It makes all your effort worth while.  We have everything in the right place executing better than ever before - revenue is growing, cost is coming down,  product lines are solid, & people are totally focused.  I think the market really do realize this which explains steady increase in SUNW lately.

We had our first meeting in Seoul to review SE operations in 6 GEMs (Geographically Established Markets) in APAC with participation from Software & Storage Practices.  We reviewed & shared operational info spanning from organization structures to best practices while discussing on how to make SE group more productive and measureable in the future.

With virtual/remote processes and technologies leading our way of communication - video/phone conferences, e-mails, on-line messaging, blogs, etc., it was very satisfying to use the old-fashioned way of communication - shaking hands, discussing issues face-to-face, and going out for dinner to build a team spirit.

Due to limited time & budget, our team building excercise evolved around Korean BBQ & Ginseng Chicken Soup (삼계탕).  I've yet to fail when I introduce these two menu to foreigners.

APAC SE Management Team

Held the first APAC SE Townhall call last Thursday where priorities & goals for FY07 were presented in addition to new SE charter as a part of "re-invigorate the technical talent in Sun's field organization".  This was the first chance to communicate to folks directly.  Although I don't have the exact number of SEs who called in, I felt the sense of genuine interest and starting of a community build-up which we haven't had for a past few years.

My biggest challenge going forward is "How do we most effectively become the bridge between product developments and customer/partners in providing solution to customers' biggest headaches/problems?".  This challenge is not unique to Sun and there is no end to it.  I see this as a lifetime homework - like a golf being a lifetime learning experience. (Yes, I do enjoy golf. )

This is a part of message I delivered to APAC SEs on who we are:

SunSTAR program is a government & Sun Korea funded program for college students to participate in 6 month internship at Sun Korea.  This program has been running for 3 years now closing out 6th term at the end of August.  It has produced around 200 SunSTARs to this date and has been rated the best program to date in the industry. 

Last Friday, I had the privilege to attend 2nd homecoming event of SunSTAR where over 100 formal SunSTARs return for a night of fun, games, & reminiscence.  It was pleasure to see all graduates became so successful in finding jobs in the real world where experiences at Sun became invaluable to them.

We talk about participating, sharing, and being open during age of participation where building a community becomes so critical.  SunSTAR program in essence drives a core value of participation age - building communities - we open source software then why not open source experiences.  Every six months, we reach out and extend Sun's community!

The following picture was taken last year when Scott visited Korea (with 4th SunSTAR program participants).

Thanks to Hal Stern's endorsement (from America's Sales Kickoff) of my blog name, this marks the birth of it.

After 17 years at Sun, I have a new & EXCITING job at Sun - Director of APAC Systems Engineering(SE) group. I am honored and all hyped-up about being part of the effort to bring SE community in the field to a new level.

I have been on the job for about a month now - met so many great people with energy wanting to make things happen.  We have great products and re-organizing to be lean & mean.  I am glad to be a part of momentum which is building up - We're the Dot in Web 2.0