Sunny Days

In my previous blog entry, I wrote about the success that Sun had at Sun Tech Days in Hyderabad. I also wanted to give an update on my other experiences and what we did to promote N1 Service Provisioning System during the event.

I should say that ours was one of the most attractive booths, since we had two wonderful toys called Sun Fire T2000 Servers sitting at our booth desk, inviting visitors and triggering their curiousity. Thanks to the server's excellent architecture and killer features, it raised many eye brows and we proudly displayed these puppies as we gave away the datasheet handouts to the guests. Harshit Kalley, Raju Alluri  and I manned the booth. As planned, we left one server open for folks to come try out the parts, ask questions and enquire about the features. The other T2000 server was powered on and had N1 SPS and Sun MC installed and live demos running (thanks to Dan). It was fun explaining to the booth visitors the CoolThreads concept and when we asked them to touch the box which was running for more than 2 days, they were amazed at how "COLD" the box was. There were lots of questions on the architecture of the box, its performance benchmarks and pricing. It was just fun !

Click image above for larger view

Since these boxes were installed with SPS software and Sun MC Software, we were well equipped to offer generous demos to our esteemed booth guests. I got a chance to showcase the Solaris plugin and the Sun Java Systems Web Server Plugin from SPS, and how someone can actually create, activate and deactivate zones from within SPS and how they can install the Sun Java Systems Web Server inside a Solaris Zone, within 4 minutes. We had a great brochure printed in color for SPS that talked about the features, architecture, platforms supported and some basic contact information. It was helpful to refer to the brochure as I explained the product to the attendees. I was impressed to see them glued and nodding in acceptance (and hopefully appreciation) to what capabilities the product has to offer. There were several interested folks who were ready to sign up to trying out SPS in their environments. I'll be glad to see some spikes in the download numbers of SPS  :)

I also gave a talk on SPS to a decently sized audience. It was already lunch time when I started my talk. In spite of that, the hall had approximately 400+ audience. I talked about application deployment challenges, how SPS can solve the mystery, went about explaining the usage scenarios and SPS modeling basics. Then I showed a demo originally created by Anshul, that showed SPS application deployments across 4 virtual hosts. I was convinced that the session was well received and I had quite a few interesting and intelligent questions to field towards the end. Some folks raced to the booth ahead of me, after the session got over. Some had follow up questions and some even appreciated the talk. I should thank my team mates (Payal, Rohan, Bharath, Vivek ) and Renu for helping me fine-tune the presentation. I guess the presentation and may be even the video of the talk might be available for public sometime soon.

Raju and harshit demonstrated how Sun MC can be used to monitor hardware. The picture below is really cool and you can see how Sun MC builds a perfect top view of the box that was being monitored.

I can't thank Raju Alluri enough for being there at the booth on both days, explaining some deeper concepts that I was not really familiar about, for making copies of the T2000 fliers, for having us over at his house for tea and helping us do some shopping which included some Red Hot Hyderabadi Chillies !