Thursday December 28, 2006

1-888-THUMPER

A while back I attended Immersion Week in St Charles near Chicago, which is a Sun internal conference / training session "for the techies" to learn about the latest products and technologies. After a morning session on Thumper (now officially Sun Fire X4500) and Honeycomb (StorageTek 5800), I decided to skip lunch and get some fresh air instead.

I walked into town, which is pretty small, and after a brisk walk, my eye suddenly fell on this truck. Not so much because of the shape or color, but of course because of the phone number. What kind of coincidence was this? The truck seemed to belong to some kind of utility repair company. And I guess the ladder will come in handy if you need to replace a disk in a "top of the rack" Thumper system. :-)

Thumper, a server/storage combination with 24TB of disk and dual AMD Opteron processors, got its code-name from John Fowler. Which was last July C|Net's "Quote of the Day" with the phrase "and from now on I'm not allowed to name anything". The summary and details of that story are still online. If it is completely true, I don't know. But it's as funny as this 1-888-THUMPER telephone number.