Thursday April 26, 2007

Imagine a world in which virtualization technologies have freed workloads from their underlying hardware and applications can be shifted at will from machine to machine with little or no service interruption.

With thanks to Dave Douglas , now imagine an eco-friendly world in which workloads automatically jump between a series of geographically-separated, solar-powered datacenters. Racing across the planet, chasing the sun. Phototropic computing.

Sun held its Technology@Sun conference this week at Chaminade in Santa Cruz, California. TAS brought together all of Sun's Fellows, Distinguished Engineers, and Technical Directors for two days of technical presentations, discussions, and networking. As a member of the conference organizing committee, I was pleased with the event and, based on many comments, the attendees were as well.

Some of the highlights included:

Sunay Tripathi from Software and Rahoul Puri from Systems gave a joint talk on Neptune and Crossbow, which demonstrated nicely how as a systems company, Sun is able to deliver value through innovation and integration at all levels of our hardware and software stacks.

Richard McDougall spoke about virtualization, giving attendees a broad view of Sun's virtualization technologies (hardware domains, Xen, Logical Domains (LDOMs), and Solaris Containers), how they relate to each other, and how our offerings compare with other available options.

Greg Papadopoulos, Sun CTO, and Mike Spain, Sun Chief Engineer, gave two excellent leadership talks. Greg's focused more on future directions, while Mike's focused on execution. Both of these are of course aspects of a successful strategy. My apologies for not having a photo of Mike Splain wearing the official badge of office of the Chief Engineer--a train engineer's hat given to him by James Gosling. I had the wrong lens on my camera!