Sydney Australian LinuxWorld 2006
LinuxWorld 2006
What a great time we had, sitting in between IBM, RedHat and Oracle, standing out not only in our bright Orange shirts and really colourful stand, but also in our technology that we were showcasing.
I am constantly amazed by the technology that we bring out at Sun and it's times like this that I love that I am working for Sun. I complete my 10 years at Sun in June and this is the most excitited I have been.
Between Solaris 10 with Zones and DTrace and all of it other fantastic features, having the OpenSolaris Project with thousands of members joining daily, our UltraSPARC T1 CPU and servers, the AMD Opteron range of servers, Sun Ray Software 4.0 with the Windows RDP Connector, the new Sun Ray 2 thin clients, Secure Global Desktop and other products we had on display, we were constantly flooded with interest.
We had HP complaining to event organisers that Sun shouldn't be at Linuxworld because Solaris is not Linux, but as one of the attendees actually told us, was a comment made by someone recently, that "Solaris is a better Linux that Linux is!!!".
We also had Oracle still trying to push their Oracle on Linux gig (but when will they learn!!). We actually asked the Oracle guys what platform do they run their Corporate systems on, and they didn't know that it was Sun Solaris. We had many a disgruntled Oracle customers telling anicdotes of how much pain they have gone through with trying to run Oracle grids with Linux. One particular customer said that it took them 2 years to try to get it to work, then they decided to goto Solaris 10 x86 using x4100 AMD x64 systems and it then took them 1 month to implement it and get it working.
We were by far the most busiest stand, and I have never spoken so much in my life. After day 2 most of us on stand duty had sore throats, and were just struggling. Attendees commented that Sun must be a great place to work, as all the Stand guys were just so uptempo and exctited that this passed onto them. It's not hard to be enthused when you have products that you can be enthused about.
It's funny though the kind of reactions we got from the attendees. Like we had our dual core AMD Opteron 64bit based Sun Fire x4100 server with it's top off, showing the fanstastic design, and people were walking past and admiring it, but then walking on. When we actually spoke to them about 90% of the attendees said "It's a amazing system but it's a bit out of our price range!!!!". When we then mentioned to them the price range and that it supports Linux, Windows and Solaris, and that we can offer support for the hardware and the software, they were immediately asking "So where I can I these from!!!".
We also demonstrated features of Solaris 10, and about 80% of those users hadn't used Solaris in about 3-4 years as when Solaris x86 went away they decided to move to Linux as it was their only option for Unix on x86. Once these people heard of Solaris 10 x86 features they all then proceeded to take a Solaris 10 x86 DVD and try it out. We handed out over 2000 Solaris 10 x86/x64 DVD's on that day, and people still wanted more.
Also with Solaris Enterprise System, and OpenSolaris we had alot of people saying that they will give Sun a go again, after a couple of years being in the wilderness "playing with Linux". We had College and University lecturers saying that as Solaris 10 is free and that with Solaris Enterprise System you can download and try many of our middleware and other software suites for free, that they will start adding Sun to the learning curriculums as they see that if their students learn Solaris then they will be worth something in the workforce. Currently they teach their students Linux, but they are always unsure on what Linux to teach their students (eg. RedHat, Debian, SuSe and derivatives of all those) and the only reason they taught their students Linux is that it was FREE. But now that Solaris is free, and is supported on many different x86/x64 platforms, and that Solaris is the major Unix in installed bases, that it would more in their students interest to teach them Solaris instead of Linux.
The main 2 misconceptions in IT land that "Sun is too expensive", "Solaris is proprietry" are just untrue now so I challenge people who are using this as the reason to stay away from Sun and Solaris to give us a go, cause it will be worth your while. Sun is back and stronger than ever, and the next year shows alot of promise.
Signing Off... Sun Ray Bruce.
Posted at 02:15PM Apr 06, 2006 by sunraybruce in General | Comments[0]