18th Irish OpenSolaris User Group Meeting
We're happy to announce the 18th Irish OpenSolaris User Group meeting! Rafael Vanoni is giving a talk about the changes that were made to OpenSolaris to support NUMA architectures. More information about the meeting, and a copy of the poster above is available on the Irish OpenSolaris User Group project pages.
If, after reading this post, you end up spending the rest of the day humming this then I'm not responsible, okay! You read the post, it's your fault! :-)
"Not just a Romanian pop song". Cute.
BIG FAT WARNING: This is the rant of a tired Romanian Solaris and Linux administrator put here for no apparent reason.
Unfortunately, there is no real Sun Microsystems in Romania. HP and IBM have hundreds of employees and a very successful business in Romania, in contrast with Sun Microsystems which has only 7 and they only come at the auctions for government contracts with Sun Enterprise 10000000k and other freezer sized servers.
I've been invited at a Sun conference a few weeks ago (I think it was the first b2b conference ever in Romania), and I asked them why they don't evangelize OpenSolaris in Romania. They said that they don't have a marketing budget. I'm sorry but an OSUG requires only 20 pizzas and a few sodas/beers and a conference room of some sort (which the company that I work for will happily provide).
From my point of view, Sun Microsystems Greece is mocking the Romanian market and missing a huge business opportunity. HP, IBM and Dell sell thousands of servers and Sun: almost ZERO. Why? because I can order a Server, but if I need a part for it, or need some issues with it solved under warranty, it will be sent to Greece (which takes at least 3 weeks), while HP will solve the problem in 24h.
The Romanian market is bigger than the one on all the countries around us taken together (Hungary, Moldova, Serbia and Bulgaria), and it's being ignored. Sorry guys, but you deserve at least some of the FUD and distrust from the geeks around you.
When Microsoft Romania and HP Romania and IBM Romania also represent the whole region, Sun has only 7 employees and one lousy reseller.
The Romanian market needs the value of OpenSolaris. We have a huge amount of Linux and BSD users that are willing to try out Solaris, but Sun is missing this opportunity.
Sorry Tim for polluting your blog with this.
Regards,
Razvan
Posted by Razvan Corneliu C.R. VILT on March 12, 2008 at 11:55 PM GMT #
Hi Razvan, that's an interesting comment (and glad you like the tag-line :-) I'll see if I can direct your comments about Sun's presence in Romania to the right person's attention here, thanks for pointing this out!
As for budget to run an OpenSolaris User group, you don't need any - you can start a user group as well as anyone else can. There's currently no budget for the Irish OpenSolaris User group, for example - it's put together by me, in my own spare time and isn't part of my day-job. I do it because I like OpenSolaris, and running the user group gives me a chance to learn more about the project and meet like minded people. Everyone wins :-)
No worries about using my blog as a place to vent - I think we at Sun would *much* rather hear about these things than have you get disenfranchised and stop using OpenSolaris altogether. As I say, I'll see if I can find out who can help.
Posted by Tim Foster on March 13, 2008 at 02:04 PM GMT #
Okay, I got in touch with some people responsible for our sales team in EMEA, and got the following response from them.
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Dear Razvan, we agree with you that our presence in Romania needs to be quickly and significantly expanded, and we are right now working on scaling up our support to this important emerging market. It is taking more time that we would like, but we are conscious of the problem that you are highlighting. Thank you very much for highlighting the issue.
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Posted by Tim Foster on March 14, 2008 at 12:19 PM GMT #
Hi Tim,
Thanks for looking into that. Fortunately, my job allowed me to join the SVOSUG 3 times until now, and hopefully a lot more in the future.
On the other hand, I am sorry for my friends and colleagues that are administrators and didn't have the pleasure of working with Sun products. While I will not stop using Solaris and OpenSolaris because of this, it certainly hinders the adoption in Romania.
Thanks for relaying my concerns. I'll make sure that if I have the chance to drop by, I'll join you guys for a beer.
Regards,
Razvan
Posted by Razvan Corneliu C.R. VILT on March 14, 2008 at 07:58 PM GMT #