| Sun Bloggers |
| Put this feed on your website |
| Description: |
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Employee Blogs |
| Format: |
RSS 2.0 |
| Url: |
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/rss |
| |
| Latest headlines |
Sun Bloggers
|
Keep Austin Weird!
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 13:47:15 -0800
A few weeks ago I was in Austin for SC08. There were a number of things going on. Prior to the main event Sun organised a HPC consortium at the Airport Hilton. We managed to get a trip out to TACC, although I had to film a bunch of the presentations which meant I didn't get to view the TACC setup.
There was also a SAMQFS BOF session associated with the HPC consortium. It was really interesting to see how enthusiastic the customer base is for SAMQ. Harriet gave an overview of SAMQ 5.0 and I gave a presentation of COMSTAR and iSCSI/iSER which provides essentially a storage transport layer for SAMQ 5.0. I also had to film the event. As it turns out the tape ran out in the middle of me speaking :-/ (which I didn't notice), so I won't have to subject you to yet more video of myself.
We also had a student event that we organised at the Karma Lounge. We had a bunch of students, live music, ipods, macbooks and the occasional beverage. Much fun was had by all. Deirdre did an awesome job organising the event.
It was then on to the main event, SC08. There was a lot going on here. I spent some time walking the vendor hall, it was massive. However, I unfortunately had work to do. Dominic and I were manning the Open Storage Bar. This sounds very cool, but it really is a pub with no beer. We'd set up a demo for SAMQ 5.0 using VMWare. However, there was a lot of talk about the Unified Storage appliance with demos too. Several other folks had the VMWare image running to demo the analytics. So I presented that and talked a lot about the Hybrid Storage Pool concept and flash in general.
SC08 kept going for the rest of the week, but I had to hit the road to PASIG in Baltimore, I'll put a post up soon about what was going on there.
|
New Tutorial : Generating a JSF CRUD Application from a Database
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 13:47:00 -0800
New tutorial on on how to generate a JSF CRUD application from a database. More....
|
Open HA Cluster with HA-xVM demo
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 13:38:15 -0800
Following our recent Open CLARC inception review of the Open HA Cluster (OHAC) agent for xVM Hypervisor guest domains, I thought a small 5 minute demo would be of interest.
Please hit the download key from the demo link to stream the demo, which can be found at the HA-xVM project page.
The demo is based on Solaris Express Community Edition build 86 and Solaris Cluster Express 2/08 simply to reflect the cheat sheet from the link above. The purpose of the demo was to show the following:
Show that an OHAC resource group managing an xVM guest domain via an OHAC resource can switch an xVM guest domain from one node to another using live migration. What's not shown is that the OHAC interconnects are used for the live migration.
Show that an OHAC managed xVM guest domain can survive a node crash.
In particular, within the demo RG1 manages xVM domain domu1. RG1 is then switched from node podio2 to node podio1 and domu1 is subsequently live migrated between the two nodes. While RG1/domu1 is online on podio1 that node podio1 is crashed via "uadmin 2 1". OHAC automatically detects that failure and restarts domu1 on podio2.
Neil GarthwaiteSolaris Cluster Engineering
|
Phase-Change Archiving
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 13:01:04 -0800
The future
of digital archiving for university and college libraries could lie in phase-change
memory technology, according to Chris Wood, CTO for
storage and data management at Sun Microsystems.
In his speech at the recent meeting of the Sun Preservation and
Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG), a gathering of university
librarians and archivists in Baltimore, Chris said
that phase-change
memory technology is likely to be a successor to aging magnetic storage
technology for librarians and archivists.
The older magnetic storage technologies have almost hit their limits
physically. Disk density is slowing. Tracks per drive are becoming a
challenge. The more tracks are condensed, the more possibility of
inaccuracies in the stored data. The capacity of optical storage
technology (DVDs and CDs) is growing, but improvements have slowed
significantly, Chris says, blunting cost effectiveness and leading
users to seek alternatives.
Phase-change technology relies on materials that change characteristics
when exposed to heat (rather than electrical charges, as do current
storage media). Its development is progressing rapidly, making it an
alternative to flash memory for archival storage as flash memory wears
out after a few thousand uses.
Image courtesy: Wikipedia
|
Docs.sun.com Redesign
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 12:44:26 -0800
Hello Docs.sun.com Customers,
We are very proud to announce the release of the updated docs.sun.com documentation website!
Based upon feedback we received from a Usability Study, plus additional comments and requests from our customer base; our Engineers at Docs.sun.com began the process of redesigning the site to include a new look and improved functionality.Key features are:
Standardization
Alignment to Sun's webdesign? component library yielding more reliable and consistent page rendering across varied browsers/platforms.
Re-use of common images, javascript, and stylesheets as other Sun websites, which means docs.sun.com will stay up to date with Sun web design standards as they continually improve.
UI Design
Cleaner, less cluttered design, stronger grouping of related content.
Removed old, relatively unused links from the Homepage.
Injection of color.
Search Engine Optimization
New Google(tm) powered search system.
Removal of the redundant (and confusing for some users) search box in the page header.
More metadata allow search engines to show what each page is about in result lists.
Additional advanced search controls will be added over the next few months.
Navigation/Finding
Ability for a user to see all documents for a product at once on the new Product Home Pages (Example: The Product Homepage for the M8000 Server- http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/prod/sparc.m8k?a=view).
Featured/current products are a single click away using the flyout menu bar on the Homepage without requiring navigating through the entire Browse Product hierarchy.
Meaningful breadcrumb trails during navigation make moving around the product hierarchy easier.
Localization (language switching)
Language selection controls are now always available on any page.
Please note that full translation is not yet complete, as of today, but will be in approximately 10 days.
We invite you to visit docs.sun.com and experience these improvements for yourself. We also encourage you to submit feedback and let us know what you think. It is always our first priority to provide an excellent service and your feedback directs us!
Thank you!
Susan Kober
Program Manager
?
|
Privacy, Domestic Intelligence, and Information Sharing on CSPAN
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 12:38:44 -0800
This is a CSPAN captured video titled "The Way Forward: Privacy, Domestic Intelligence, and Information Sharing" on CSPAN is absolutely worth watching. As was stated at CSPAN: "The Majority Staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security hosted
this series of roundtable discussions on the future of privacy, civil
rights, and civil liberties at the Department of Homeland Security in
Cannon House Office Building."
The balance between privacy and security is an ongoing balancing act. A good point brought out is that we need not only a CTO for the United States, (John Doerr suggested Bill Joy) but we need a Chief Security Czar as well.
Sun Microsystems has the absolute best Identity Management solution that is being open sourced with Sun's Open SSO Enterprise being a great recent example. As I have often said, look at the Intelligence Agencies for the right way to think about security, look at Telcos for the right way to think about availability and look at manufacturing and NASA for realtime and look at Wall Street regarding putting all three together.
Look for Sun Microsystems to continue to show leadership in all of these very important markets.
|
Voltage
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 12:29:23 -0800
This is interesting. More of this type of innovation and technology, and bailouts might not be necessary.
|
What is Sun xVM Server?
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 12:24:58 -0800
I realized recently that the different products in the Sun xVM portfolio might start to blend together after a while. I mean, they're meant to work together, but we haven't talked about what features are stand-alone and what aren't. So I'll start by talking about what Sun xVM Server does - by itself, and in combination with Sun xVM Ops Center.
Sun xVM Server is an x86/x64 hypervisor based on OpenSolaris and the work of the Xen community. It's Type 1, so it's installed on bare metal, and it includes the framework for managing guests (our term for virtual machines) and a web server which produces the browser user interface (BUI).
Once Sun xVM Server is available (soon), you'll be able to download and install it. Getting it up and running takes us an hour, but that could vary based on your hardware. Once it's up and running, you have several options for guests - Windows, Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Red Hat. It can also import existing VMware appliances. It supports both hardware-assisted virtualization and paravirtualization, and can generally handle as many active guests as you've got memory and space for. You can manage the Sun xVM Server and all of its guests from any browser through the BUI.
If your environment is larger scale, then Sun xVM Ops Center - our datacenter management tool - can be used with Sun xVM Server. You can use Sun xVM Ops Center to combine multiple Sun xVM Servers into Virtual Pools, which let you migrate guests between Sun xVM Servers. Virtual Pools can also be set to automatically load-balance your Sun xVM Servers or move guests to another system in the case of a hardware failure.
That's the short version, at least. There's a video demo that may be helpful as well. If you have any Sun xVM Server questions, ask away. I'll follow up with similar explanations of the other products in the portfolio.
Edit: If you're interested in getting your hands on Sun xVM Server as soon as possible, you can sign up for early access by sending an email to xvm-server-ea-request@sun.com. They'll add you to the list and hook you up with an ISO.
|
Cloud Computing: A $42B industry by 2012?
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 12:24:39 -0800
When Industry pundits ( like IDC ) come out with a report that describes cloud computing to be a $42 B industry by 2012 , you always take these with a grain of salt. As you know some of these analysts (not IDC though ) also predicted that the .com bubble would grow to a mega billion dollar industry. There are however some key takeaway points in this report that could make this number a realistic estimate.
Two interesting claims the report makes are:
The $42 billion number is a small (10%) percentage of the overall IT spend - which is at a whopping $490B - however the year over year is at at 27% growth as compared to a 7% growth for IT spend.
As shown below, the Application Service provider market (SaaS) is almost half of this pie: at 57% of the pie. The rest is split between infrastructure and platform ( IaaS and PaaS )
So like any good scientist , I decided to validate these claims with some ground numbers and observations.
Given that there are close to 50 plus top "cloud" vendors out there , ( it would take a long time to research revenue across all these - you would hope that IDC did that ) , I focused at the big boys and see if the numbers match up with IDC assessment for 2008.
Amazon: Amazon classifies its AWS revenue under "Other" in the quarterly filings. Here is the total "other" column from their Q3FY08 report ( all numbers in $$M ).
Q3 2007
Q4 2007
Q1 2008
Q2 2008
Q3 2008
Change Y/Y%
$92
$131
$111
$126
$130
42%
So with EC2 and S3 ( compute and storage ) this is about half a billion dollar a year business for amazon but growing at a whopping 42% Y/Y change.
Given that IDC claims that storage and compute is about a 14% of a $16 B market ( or about $2.24 B ) , and that there are numerous companies in this space ( from the list above ), Amazon is definitely in a good position by owning about a quarter of this market ( and looking to grow it ). As we all know with their recent announcements, they are looking to enter other parts of the pie.
Now lets look at the heavy weight gorilla in the SaaS space: Salesforce.com.
SalesForce.com : Reports earnings in the billion dollar ranges . For the quarter ending sep 2008, here are the numbers:
Three months ending
Nine Months Ending
Oct 2008
Oct 2007
2008
2007
Revenue
Subscription and Support
$253,403
$176,376
$718,464
$484,064
Prof Services and other
$23,084
$16,427
$68,722
$47,730
Total
$276,487
$192,803
$787,186
$531,794
So salesforce is projected at approximately a $1B revenue with a 43% y/y growth!
IDC estimates the market to be at around $7B dollars in FY08 and with so many players in this space, it is quite likely that salesforce.com controls about 15% of the market.Google, the other 800lb gorilla doesnt break out their numbers to get a sense but you can imagine their enterprise offerings ( in mail and google apps and other platform offerings ) are in the multi million dollar ranges at least.
So is the IDC survey sound plausible? Yes, the numbers seem to validate.
One thing the survey does not point to is that as this market evolves, the applications mentioned here will move into the more "custom space" targeting particular verticals : healthcare, education, finance, telecommunications, government , media and so on. With the initiative of force.com, you can already see the path salesforce is going. Could there be vertical clouds that could emerge with specialized platform and services? You betcha.
As with any rising tides, there will be many winners and losers but this market is definitely looking big enough to catch the attention of all big players. Delivering on Ray Ozzie's 2 year old memo taking Microsoft to this space, Microsoft just started delivering with their large azure push. And as history shows, when MS enters any market, the market is not only validated but the game face is on.
So what is Sun doing in this space? That is quite literally, the billion dollar question - stay tuned for that sooner than later!.
|
Is Email = Efail?
Wed, 3 Dec 2008 12:09:46 -0800
Coding Horror blog comes up with some fun stuff on a regular basis, Is Email = Efail? is a good one,
What we can to combat the email = efail problem? Take Tantek's advice: whenever possible, avoid sending email. Not because we don't want to communicate with our peers. Quite the contrary. We should avoid sending email out of a deep respect for our peers -- so that they are free to communicate as effectively and as often as possible with us.
Channel that private email effort into a public outlet. Discussion boards, blog entries, comments, wikis, you name it. If it can be indexed by a web search engine, you're in the right place -- and many more people can potentially find, answer, and benefit from that information.
If you must send email, make it as short as possible. Think of it as Strunk and White on speed. Can you reduce your email into a single paragraph? How about two sentences? How about just the title field with no body, even?
Remember the theory of communication escalation. Email is just one communication tool in our toolkit; that doesn't mean it is always the right one for whatever situation is at hand. Take advantage of phone calls, instant messaging, text messages, and so forth, as appropriate. Scale your choice of communication method to the type of conversation you're having, and don't be afraid to escalate it (or demote it!) as the ebb and flow of the conversation shifts.
So if you've emailed me, and I haven't responded in a timely fashion, I apologize. I know it may sound crazy, but I've been desperately clawing my way out from under this mountain of pebbles.
Although I don't totally subscribe to what he says, my volume of e-mail is definitely really high.
I don't delete a lot of my work e-mail as I use it to search for information and decisions made. I have over 12K e-mails just for this year alone, that I have kept. I am still working out how to organize them all, as searching these can work, but it can get tricky to get the right search incantation. I now have an Info inbox in which I place e-mails I have searched for and found the exact information I needed, a kind of history of successful searches.
I have sent over 14K e-mails since Oct 2005. The last time I did the math, it was something like 12 e-mails/day 7 days/week, WOW!!!
After reading Is Email = Efail?, I decided to try and reduce the volume I send out by blogging more and see how that works out.
|
|