Thoughts on Thin Computing, Latency, Minimization, Solaris and Multiplicity ...of...it...all Isaac's musings

 

This week I am attending an annual insurance industry event, IASA 2009, in Orlando, Florida. On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I had teamed up with Paul Dolbec, along with our colleagues from CSC, to represent the joint partnership between Sun and CSC at this important business conference. The event ran from Sunday through Wednesday, and like many other events of this type had a few components: educational sessions, CIO/CFO  roundtable and an exhibit hall.  While the exhibit hall was bustling with vendors, various interesting sessions added to the true flavor of the event. Keynotes included great speakers such as Michael Eisner, Joe Theismann and Steve Gilliland. The conference was interesting in that, for me, it offered an opportunity to further understand the insurance industry, the challenges of regulations that touch various aspects of accounting and taxation, as well as the ever-growing impact of IT.  At the CSC booth that we put together, we were showcasing Sun's ultra-thin client technologies, demonstrating mobility with security through the use of smart-card technologies across the Sun Ray devices that we had installed at the booth. The setup, for the event's purposes, involved utilising a laptop pre-loaded with VMware ESX, running 2 virtual machines - one running Microsoft Windows XP and the other VM running Solaris 10. We had a number of simple demos setup that demonstrated the ability to rotate through individual desktop experiences serving either a Windows or a Solaris desktop.  (I am obliged to acknowledge Keith Cantrel for his assistance (during, what I imagine would've been  a quiet Sunday afternoon for him otherwise)  remotely hacking through a directory corruption issue that helped get us back up online). Thank you, Keith!!

The impact of having to reduce costs on the desktop as desktop refresh cycles come about can be tremendous, particularly when paying attention to the fact that these devices draw only about ~7 watts of power, do not have an OS that has to be managed on them and in the process appeal to use-cases such as being used in call-centers, for disaster recovery purposes, pandemic planning and remote/on-boarding process.  

As an example, CSC had been deploying Sun Ray's through their Desktop Anywhere program for quite some time now. For details, take a look here

So how does this relate to the concept of new era in computing? (Ah, the plot begins to emerge!) Just as technology continues on its path of evolution, the ultra-thin computing continues to be identified as a viable and mature opportunity for cost savings on the desktop.  If this is music to your ears, as it is to many of our existing customers, then I'd like to invite you to take a listen to Nova Era - a group of professional musicians I had met last evening after the conference, while strolling along at Downtown Disney.  Turns out they've been performing with Disney since the late 90's.  I was amazed at the sound quality and their live performance - had an opportunity to meet and talk with them in-person during a break in their performance, and was just pleased to realize that classical music lives on!  Very, very cool!

 

Today's date is 4/20/2009  ...and if you're into numerology you'll quickly recognize that the sum of all integers is 17;  follow the yellow brick road here

The exciting news is out!  See Sun's announcement and Oracle's announcement  

While there are a number of processes to go through as part of this deal, there are lots of technologies that are merging together to deliver a more integrated platform stack to deliver the value that customers are looking for today.

Perhaps a surprise to many - the reality is that between the two companies we have a very large shared installed base across many industries. 

For the longest time, Sun and Oracle have jointly worked on integrating each other's technologies through SOATC (Sun Oracle Application Technology Center).  I, for one, have worked on a number of projects integrating Oracle's Parallel Server services (pre-RAC) and Sun Cluster technologies on top of Solaris.  Long history between the companies - lots of synergy and it'll be very interesting to see how it all begins to pan out following today's announcement.  

 

Rangers lost to Boston Bruins on Saturday night.  I just can't stop wishing for '94 all over again...

As I travel around the world I am constantly asked by customers about our strategy for VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). While the VDI market itself is relatively young (albeit growing very rapidly as various technologies are establishing an edge for themselves in different aspects of VDI), a key element of the entire picture is not just data locality (which is largely a function of ever-expanding bandwidth) but the means to service access itself.  That is to say that the user of the desktop is now being more and more challenged to essentially be decoupled from the actual personal computing device and, instead, be associated with the application execution environment - ala "The Desktop".  Assumptions of data security/integrity and device access being postulates, the ever-growing need for workers to be mobile - mixed with the notion that "thin is in" to reduce cost by driving lower power consumption and reduce software operation/licensing costs - has many financial institutions investigating various alternatives. This trend is more noticeable now, as many of these companies are struggling to deal with the global economic downturn that has left many of the weaker financial players either on the sidelines or, in a better case, - acquired by stronger financial entities. This is happening now, at a time when security, operational and compliance demands are at extremely high levels. Mergers and acquisitions are a natural outcome in times like these and as financial services firms merge - newly acquired employees will need to access back-office applications from current office locations in order to maintain employee productivity across all parts of the organisation. The need to onboard newly acquired employees securely and efficiently, to provide them access to back-office applications reliably and productively, without having to undergo a costly cross organizational network integration, has never been a higher priority for the financial services market segment. 

Now, if you've been around the industry for a few years, you've probably heard a thing or two about Sun's contributions to this space - how Sun's motto that "The Network Is The Computer" actually gets translated to something meaningful for "The Desktop". Sun's innovations in this space go way back at least 10 years ago - when the research and development work of Sun Lab's engineers had culminated in a first product release of the Sun Ray unit (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray for a quick history tidbit).  One of the crucial elements of this products design is the Appliance Link Protocol (ALP) - that is responsible for the best in-class user experience - particularly demonstrateable across wide area networks (where the user's physical location is quite a distance away from where the user's desktop might be) - and the levels of patience are directly proportional to network latencies of the day.

The Sun Ray device is ultra-thin (it doesn't have an operating system and is completely stateless) - its operating as a display engine for all of the data processing that happens in the data centre. The actual bits that get sent from the data centre to the device are compressable and yield a very amenable and competitive user experience especially in  high network latency environments.  Having a Sun Ray device on your office desktop or at home does not solve today's mobility dilemma. While it is true that Sun - as well as a growing list of other companies are - is offering some of their employees a "Sun Ray at Home" program, the moment you have to travel on a train, on a plain, on a bus - is when you wish you had your "desktop" with you.  And while iPhone can deliver email and let you look at you calendar, .pdf's and spreadsheets, its just not your "desktop". So - what do you do? 

Most of us have a laptop - and while we are asked not to keep company sensitive data on our laptops - how many of us outthere really heed such advice ? How, then, do we access our applications and associated data that is managed centrally for us? We run a local OS and access that data remotely. Now what would happen if the laptop got lost or stolen? Simple - the data that we had on the laptop's hard disk is now in the hands of someone who will likely go prowling through it. Is that what we want? Ummm, no.

So, what do we do? "Elementary my dear Watson" - we move to offer an access layer on the laptop that connects you to the backend.  Then, with a broadband card available for $0 with a 2-year contract from Cingular (for example),  you access your data.  This isn't news - Citrix have done this sort of thing already.  There's a price tag associated with that, of course - and depending on where you're coming from and what you're happy to settle for this may be exactly what you're after.  But if you have a Sun Ray environment deployed what would really be interesting is to run a piece of software that gives you EXACTLY the same look and feel as if you were connecting from a Sun Ray device.  To give you that enhanced level of crossover, mobility and device indepdendence. The ability to maximize the ROI of the existing PC laptop/desktop gear that you'd invested in and have plenty of - and as you look to evaluate where Sun Ray can be deployed in your organisation, your users realise that all of a sudden they can connect and RESUME  their  session at a point EXACTLY where they'd left it the day prior - when they'd left the office for that important client meeting just hours prior.

Oh, and when they're back at the office - just have them insert the personalized secure smart card into the Sun Ray, authenticate, and resume the session EXACTLY where it'd been left off while accessing it on the laptop with a 3G modem in the airport! The increased productivity and cost savings presented by an opportunity to decrease desktop management challenges (and associated licensing costs) is only the beginning.

Sound cool? You bet it FEELS cool, too!

(Oh, maaan, I didn't even mention ZFS and solid-state disks in this context!)

In my new role at Sun, I've started to shift my focus toward the desktop end of the datacenter spectrum. Very often I get asked the question of who is using Sun's thin client/desktop appliance technology, Sun Ray, in Financial Services. So how do Sun Ray and Sun's VDI offerings apply to Banking, Trader's desktop, Branch modernization aspects of the financial services industry?

Here are a few public successes stories particularly around FSI.

1)Bank Improves Customer Service using Sun Ray Technology. Sparkasse Haslach-Zell is a savings bank headquartered in Zell,
Germany. The bank has 11 branch offices, employs 230 people and manages EUR 900 million. Details: http://www.sun.com/customers/software/sparkasse.xml
2) Netsol/Chelsea Financial Services: Sun Ray Desktop Solution Success Story. Details: http://www.sun.com/sunray/docs/TeamNetsol082703ss.pdf
3) Savings and Credit Bank Kuwait. Kuwaiti Bank Gains a Scalable Architecture with High Availability and Efficient, Centralized Desktop Management. Details: http://www.sun.com/customers/storage/scb.xml
4) World's oldest financial services institution, in Italy, chooses Sun Ray. Details: http://www.sun.com/customers/software/banca_mps.xml
5) Reuters use of Sun Ray and Secure Global Desktop in China. Details: http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2006-10/sunflash.20061026.4.xml and http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/105/1/ClientSystems/17123

Additionally of interest should be the following:
Toronto's Center of Excellence, joint work with Sun's partner - Scalar Decisions - highlighting Sun Ray/SGD technology for next-generation trading systems. Details: http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/102/3/ClientSystems/16759

Sun Ray is not a new technology. It has been evolving over the last 10 years and arguably first appeared way ahead of its time in the early mid-90's. It has been featured in the financial services/trader press specifically:

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/it-infrastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208402360
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1889496/
http://www.cio.in/news/viewArticle/ARTICLEID=5098

And of course we have a number of financial institutions that are not comfortable being public about what they're doing. If the latest mergers and acquisitions activities in the financial services industry are of any indication into activities that happen as crucial business and IT components (datacenters, desktops, employee integration and onboarding, mobility) are undertaken, rest assured that the big names in the industry are doing quite a bit. That should read: "Quite A Bit" actually. And all for a number of good reasons:

1) Network performance vs. the competition, particularly around WAN deployments (think: Singapore to London to New York). A number of banks have done (some are doing) their own testing to see for themselves. Yes, the kind that involves serious WAN latency simulators (Shunra comes to mind). We would love to help you with yours.

2) Cost [not just acquisition but ongoing large user base management]: the per user cost for a desktop client is much less then a PC. It has a very very very very small firmware footprint, essentially NO OS running, meaning that it doesn't have to be managed for updates against viruses/malware/anything. And yes, it operates very well with your favorite Operating system and delivers awesome access to applications (Windows, Solaris, Linux, etc.). "Zero-administration" is what my next Sun t-shirt ought to say.

3) Multimedia enhancements - in cases of VDI integration, quite a bit of work has already been done using VMware's and Sun's brokering technologies to deliver access to RDP sessions - and more is in the works! There are of course a number of non-financial use cases (Verizon, Time Warner) that, although aren't part of the financial services umbrella, do resonate with the types of business units that banks have been eyeing dekstop appliances for (customer-facing counters [read: branch tellers], call centers [read: customer service agents]). Been to swap or upgrade your cable/modem service recently? At Sun, of course, we've been doing it for years, saving millions in infrastructure & maintenance (power, cooling) costs.

And, if you're ever in Singapore, please do stop by Sun's office at 1 Magazine Road for a peek at a local "Bank on Sun" showcase, featuring Sun Ray's integration with many branch-focused input devices.

Don't turn a blind eye and don't judge Sun by where we were 6-7 years ago. Instead, judge us by what we've got up our sleeve now

More soon!

 

New York City on the 1st day of November ...aaah, yet another data point reminding us that the flavor of autumn has once again made its appearance.  I love autumn!  As if last night's stroll with the kids trick-or-treating wasn't enough, this morning's cold, crisp air (augmented with randomly dancing yellowish leaves occasionally painted with traces of red and orange) created such a wonderful & unique experience. (Had it rained, the experience would not only have been  unique but a wet one, too!)

The constant hustle and bustle of the city was no different today.  Brooklyn's Marriott Hotel (by the the historic Brooklyn Bridge) hosted this year's New York City Government Technology Forum.  Sun was one of the sponsors. There was an exhibit with many interesting (and well-known) vendors catering to the City, State and Federal Government industries.  I had an honor of speaking at this event; topic - Server Virtualization.

Together with Christopher Theon (Practice Manager, GTSI) and Marcos Merced (an MIS Director from DoITT) we had just over an hour to define and discuss server virtualization.  We divided the time frame into, roughly, three 15 to 20-minute timeslots (to allow opportunity for Q&A). Since my topic dealt with introducing virtualization and discussing hardware and software components, I spoke first. My goal was to remain vendor-neutral and provide an objective overview of server virtualization technologies. (I hope I've succeeded in meeting that goal).  Here are my presentation slides.   Chris extended the discussion by picking up on the business drivers that I had introduced.  He took the discussion further into cost analysis and other business-centric elements that are critical in evaluating the approach and success of a virtualization project.  Marcos talked about a case study of deploying VMware solutions over the last 3 years, and how it has helped his organization  improve overall agility and importantly - reduce costs.  While each of our topics could well take an hour, each on their own, I would love to hear what you thought (if you were among those attending).   

And if you weren't in the audience, I would still love to hear about creative ways that you've used to employ virtualization technologies to address business drivers (even if you did not [or do not] use an ounce of Sun's technology to accomplish that)...

 

Last week I had an opportunity to meet with and present to one of our interesting financial customers (who will remain nameless for non-disclosure reasons). Subject of the meetings had been Solaris, virtualization, container management, processor roadmap discussions (and so forth).

 During the meeting we discussed how Solaris Zones are being used with a real business strategy in mind. Although Zones are a nice feature of Solaris, when taken at face value it doesn't really stand out until you do something creative with it, something so customer-specific (yet amazing!) that vendors typically do not offer out of the box.   What I am referring to here is facility that's been developed [in-house] that focuses on empowering lines of business units to self-sufficiently create Solaris Zone environments for themselves, via  a webtool. 

Not only that, but what had been demo'ed to me actually appeared as a working, really thought through, solution that, at its core, has business drivers in mind.  One of the key deliverables of this webtool is that it leverages inexpensive technology to enable the consumer to request an instantiation of a pre-defined zone profile (and there are a few), with storage, processing power, memory, IP allocation, etc. - self-sufficiently via the intranet web! On top of that, a Zone gets provisioned and becomes available for use in less then a minute!  

How does this exponentiate the coolness factor ?  It allows the customer to expedite the time to requisite hardware/processing space in the datacenter and shrink that from what it would otherwise be (and you know how long that may take) ...down to 20 seconds!

I was amazed.   The idea is really straight forward - there are a number of servers, SAN storage and IP address pools that are allocated for LOB's as a co-operative. Leveraging Solaris Zones (often referred to as Containers), the tool offers up an opportunity for end-users to pick a pre-defined Zone profile (there's a set, reflecting typical types of applications that are of utmost interest, held in a cpio archive).  An end-user access the internal website, chooses an available profile, fills out some basic information about a zone and submits a form. Within seconds, the work is done. The user sees progress of zone creation, gets notified by email when the process is complete. Because it is a shared environment, a zone has an expiration date (think: leasing) that can be adjusted (if needed).

[BRILLIANT, MIKE!]
 

---

 

8/12/07 - Update and a response to comments -

 

I understand the tools were pretty much  PHP and CGI-like scripts on the backend to call things like zonecfg(1M) and zoneadm(1M).  I do not have specifics as to the effort, however I inquired as to the timeframe for getting this sort of thing done and I understand it was done in a matter of a few months, by one key person working on this often on their own time - as a pet project.


Since this is based on the Solaris 10 11/06 release (which backported* a ton of Zone/ZFS integration code from OpenSolaris/Nevada), the zone clone feature is leveraged, so is the ZFS filesystem, which is what zones get deployed to and how reservation and quotas are enforced. They also provide storage for data on ZFS so its easier to manage and delegate complete control of ZFS filesystems to the Zone administrator - voila!

*For those that may not be aware of this fact, a currently available commercial release of Solaris does get features from the next release currently in development. As such, Solaris 10 does get certain features from the next release of Solaris  being developed in the OpenSolaris community. The codename for the SunOS 5.11 kernel is Nevada and that is where new features appear first, prior to getting (if appropriate) backported/integrated into the Solaris 10 codebase. See http://www.opensolaris.org for more.

 

These past few weeks have been interestingly eventful.

 

In June Brian Gupta and I kicked off an OpenSolaris User Group for the New York area. 

In July we had Ian Murdock and Sara Dornsife visit us while in New York.
As a quick reference, Ian Murdock is a founder of Debian distribution and a former Chief Technology Officer at the Linux Standards Base, whilst Sara runs OpenSolaris Marketing.

Details and some initial responses from the July meeting have been interesting, to say the least. We were very pleased to have had a number of members of the New York Linux User Group and UNIGROUP communities with us. This is what communities are all about. Thank you to all who make events such as this educational and fun.

A day later we had an all-day Sun/Solaris marketing event in our New York office, followed by a pipe explosion a block away from our office. NOT fun!

Earlier that day, I had a 40 minute time slot to present to a room full of customers on the features and futures of Solaris. For obvious reasons I can not distribute content in writing that alludes to future-available features and timeframes, but I have sanitized it to the extent that, I think, allows me to confidently portray the types of things that we are expecting in a Solaris update really-soon-now. What's interesting is that a good number of features that will be showing up in Solaris have actually been out there in the OpenSolaris world for a while. This is how we develop Solaris and if you're not yet an OpenSolaris community member, what is stopping you?

You're welcome to take a peak at the slides if you missed it when I presented it in New York (and Somerset, NJ the next day).

Let me know what you think.

Ah, April 1st ...

Who would like to be teased? 

Ever wonder why so many blogs are about cats and dogs that people have and adore? Well, I don't have a dog, nor do I have a cat, but.... my sister has a Rottweiller so I guess that qualifies for a blog entry related to dogs.   And yes, he has been to my datacenter.  Sniffed quite a bit actually, all without causing any downtime.

Please check out some of the videos that give you a closer in-depth look into what Project Blackbox is all about. Thanks to Dave Douglas and everyone on the team who helped make this happen!!

Today I am acting as a point person at Sun's exhibit table at the United Nations in midtown New York, where AIT Global is holding its 18th Annual Conference, Workshops & Exhibit.

This year's topics include: Best Practices & Solutions for SOA, IT Infrastructure, InfoSec and Web4Development.
Glenn Brunette (Sun's Distinguished Engineer) and Michelle Dennedy(Sun's Chief Privacy Officer) are both speaking today.

With only 3 hours into the event, I've already seen so much interest in this that I've almost ran out of most of the collateral I brought to give out.

The picture boards for the exhibit are quite indicative of the phenomenon.
See for yourself! (please pardon the resolution - I am doing this from the event itself!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the setup.... and this is I with Glenn Brunette 

Sun's annual Customer Engineering Conference is taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this year. For those who may not know what this is, it is an annual event that involves a broad range of employees from across all spectra of Sun's technical community across the world.

The event acts as one of the platforms that we, at Sun, use to continually invest in our employees' ongoing technical advancement. One of the unique characteristics of this particular event is that it is primarily targeted toward customer-facing engineers - while a majority of speakers are themselves in customer-facing roles. This allows for an open forum for exchange of ideas, fueled by a vast array of experiences on the use of different client's requirements and technology implementations.

This year the conference is taking place September 30th through October 4th. My contribution will be a presentation on the subject of Solaris 10 Minimization: Lessons Learned from the field. The subject of Solaris minimization is near and dear to many of our customers' hearts, especially those in the Financial services space.

The topic is not something that is new, yet it has grown in visibility and importance due to increased audit and compliance requirements that financial clients need to exercise in their IT infrastructures.

Two of my back-to-back sessions are scheduled for Tuesday, October 3rd - and are as follows:

Session Id: S284161
Session Title: Solaris 10 Adoption and Minimization: Lessons Learned
Track:
Room: 2010
Date: 03-OCT-06
Start Time: 16:50

Session Id: S284161
Session Title: Solaris 10 Adoption and Minimization: Lessons Learned
Track:
Room: 2010
Date: 03-OCT-06
Start Time: 18:00 

As in the past, the event promises to be really exciting and I am looking forward to it.

So I've been working with Solaris Resource Manager for a few years now, and as part of my ongoing work with it, I have developed a utility that captures SRM statistics overtime and produces nice reports in HTML and ASCII (that could be input into a spreadsheet or a data-processing engine for chargeback, etc.)

I DO have Sample SRM reports produced by SRM Reporter (based on SRM 1.3 product from Sun, which works on Solaris 2.6 - through Solaris 8 (inclusive). I am working on adapting the utility for being able to do the same on Solaris 10 (and 9).

For now, sample reports are available at the following URL: http://unixability.com/SRM

How to navigate the available SRM reports:

Once there, you'll be presented with a list of hosts, each host containing Daily, Weekly, Monthly report types.

You should select the host named "malish" and look at all three types of reports for that host.

All other hosts listed there are used as place holders for future development. (Currently I only have SRM running on one machine, namely, "malish").

Once you click on one of three report types, you'll be presented with a list of available reports of that type, for that particular host. The available reports are sorted by date.

Please note - since I use this machine for many experimental purposes, some reports may appear to show questionable data. If you do come across a report that looks questionable, please let me know and I'll be happy to clarify.

Any questions, please feel free to give me a call or send me an email.

Isaac

well... maybe not just Sun marketing... but I must admit that it is quite pleasant to see us make some investments in advertising, eventhough not all ad submissions end up being accepted.

If you haven't heard, on 9/12/05 (at our quarterly launch) we have announced availability of the next best thing since sliced bread.

Great job everyone!
-I