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<?xml version="1.0" encoding='utf-8'?><?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://blogs.sun.com/roller-ui/styles/atom.xsl" media="screen"?><feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <title type="html">Jonathan Schwartz's Blog</title> <subtitle type="html">Jonathan Schwartz's Blog</subtitle> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/feed/entries/atom</id> <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/feed/entries/atom" /> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/" /> <updated>2009-12-15T07:22:44-08:00</updated> <generator uri="http://roller.apache.org" version="4.0.1.1 (BSC) (20091027075624)">Apache Roller</generator> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/will_java_be_the_world</id> <title type="html">Will the Java Platform Create The World's Largest App Store?</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/will_java_be_the_world"/> <published>2009-05-18T21:37:00-07:00</published> <updated>2009-05-18T21:37:59-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="app" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="appstore" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="javastore" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="store" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="vector" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><embed src="http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/1640183659?isVid=1" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"flashVars="playerID=1640183659&@videoPlayer=23673850001&servicesURL=http://services.brightcove.com/services&cdnURL=http:/ /admin.brightcove.com&domain=embed&autoStart=false&"base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj"width="486" height="322" seamlesstabbing="false"type="application/x-shockwave-flash"allowFullScreen="true"swLiveConnect="true"pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"> </embed> <P>To say the past few months have been a whirlwind is an understatement.<P> And thanks for the reminders, I recognize it's been a while since I've posted a blog. For reasons why, just <A HREF="http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/709519/000119312509107681/dprem14a.htm#toc42384_37">click here</A> to read the background. And before you ask, SEC regulations and securities laws limit what I can discuss about the Oracle transaction, so don't expect any insights on the topic.<P><A HREF="http://www.java.com" ><IMG style="float:left; margin: 00px 10px 10px 0px; cursor:pointer; width: 50px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/java_smi_logo_rgb.jpg"></a> But there's still a ton going on at Sun - with <A HREF="http://java.sun.com/javaone/">JavaOne</A> (June 2nd, in San Francisco) coming up fastest on the horizon. We're preparing to reveal what I believe is one of the most important advancements ever for the Java community - and this time, it's all about revenue and business opportunity.<P>As you know, we're fond of throwing great big numbers around when talking about Java's distribution: billions of PCs', mobile devices, and smartcards, millions of enterprise servers, set top boxes, Blu-Ray DVD players and a growing number of very cool Kindles (buy one <A HREF="www.amazon.com/kindle">here</A>). Very few technologies on the internet have anywhere near that kind of distribution muscle. Adobe's Flash, and Microsoft's Windows are just about its only peers when measured by runtime volume.<P><p> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/kindle"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 200px;" src="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/nell/photos/hero-top-right-05._V244132736_.jpg"/> </a> </p> But not all Java runtimes are the same. For most devices, from RIM's Blackberry to Sony's Blu-Ray DVD players, original equipment manufacturers (known as "OEM's") license core Java technology and brand from Sun, and build their own Java runtime. Although we're moving to help OEM's with more pre-built technology, the only runtimes currently that come direct from Sun are those running on Windows PC's. <P>And oddly enough, that's made the Windows Java runtime our most profitable Java platform. I thought I'd provide some insight into that business here, and then introduce a project we're planning to unveil at this year's JavaOne, known internally as Project Vector.<P>As a business model, traffic for traffic's sake isn't that interesting (but never confuse traffic with <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/step_one_adoption">adoption</a>). Free internet traffic is only interesting if a third party is willing to pay to drive distribution of their content to your audience - from highway billboards to internet runtimes, businesses will pay for exposure and distribution to drive their business, whether through branding/advertising, delivering news, or selling movies or retail products. "Getting distribution" used to mean getting access to bricks and mortar distributors in shopping malls - nowadays, it means having another company propel your content into the market via the internet.<P>Now to that point, a few years ago, we called our friends at one of the world's largest search companies (you can guess who), to talk about helping them with software distribution - because of Java's ubiquity, we had a greater capacity than almost anyone to distribute software to the Windows installed base. We signed a contract through which we'd make their toolbar optionally available to our audience via the Java update mechanism. They paid us a much appreciated fee, which increased dramatically when we renegotiated the contract a year later. Distribution was becoming quite valuable to us and to them - and given the "take" rates, or the rates at which consumers were choosing to install new content, the Java audience saw value in the new application. <p> <a href="http://www.java.com/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 150px;" src="http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javase/security_adv/figure1.png"/> </a> </p> The year following, the revenue increased dramatically again - when an aspiring search company (again, you can figure out who) outbid our first partner to place their toolbar in front of Java users (this time, limited to the US only). Toolbars, it turns out, are a significant driver of search traffic - and the billions of Java runtimes in the market were a clear means of driving value and opportunity. <P>The revenues to Sun were also getting big enough for us to think about building a more formal business around Java's distribution power - to make it available to the entire Java community, not simply one or two search companies on yearly contracts.<P>And that's what Project Vector is designed to deliver - Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world. Vector (which we'll likely rename the Java Store), has the potential to deliver the world's largest audience to developers and businesses leveraging Java and JavaFX. What kinds of companies might be interested?<P>If you talk to a Fortune 500 company or a startup, pretty much everyone craves access to consumers - which is the one problem we've solved with the Java platform. Most folks don't think of Sun as a consumer company, and largely we're not, but our runtimes reach more consumers than just about any other company on earth. That ubiquity has obvious value to search companies, but it's also quite valuable to banks looking to sign up new accounts, sports franchises looking for new viewers, media companies and news organizations looking for new subscribers - basically, any Java developer looking to escape the browser to reach a billion or so consumers.<P>How will it work? Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won't be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution - but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That's clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world's largest audience.<P><a href="http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/west/index.jsp"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 100px;" src="http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/images/C1E_14_Bubbles.gif"/> </a> </p> This creates opportunity for everyone in the developer community - and specifically, for any developer (even those not using Java/JavaFX) seeking to reach beyond the browser to create a durable relationship with their customers (and btw, don't forget to join us for CommunityOne - the day before JavaOne, June 1st, same location - click the graphic to learn more). Remember, when apps are distributed through the Java Store, they're distributed directly to the desktop - JavaFX enables developers, businesses and content owners to bypass potentially hostile browsers.<P>For details on how Vector will work, when it'll be available, how to submit your content or application - alongside insights into Project Vector's technology, roadmap, features and business model, come see us at JavaOne... In the interim, you can learn more about the latest JavaFX news at <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/javafx">sun.com/javafx</A>, and download the latest JavaFX design tools at <A HREF="http://www.netbeans.org/features/javafx/index.html">netbeans.org</A>. <P>And although we obviously don't comment on rumors, we might even have a special guest or two at JavaOne.<P>See you in San Francsico (or on the webcast...)! <P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/unified_computing</id> <title type="html">Sun's Cloud (4 of 4)</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/unified_computing"/> <published>2009-03-18T22:54:00-07:00</published> <updated>2009-03-18T22:55:14-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="cloud" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="crossbow" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="qlayer" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="solaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sun" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="virtualbox" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">In the last three updates to this blog, I've tried to set out a clear direction of where Sun's headed. I've talked about our three basic priorities:<P><b>1. Technology Adoption<br>2. Commercial Innovation<br>3. Efficiently Connecting Adoption and Commercial Opportunity.</b><P><embed src="http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/1640183659?isVid=1" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"flashVars="playerID=1640183659&@videoPlayer=16676240001&servicesURL=http://services.brightcove.com/services&cdnURL=http:/ /admin.brightcove.com&domain=embed&autoStart=false&"base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj"width="486" height="322" seamlesstabbing="false"type="application/x-shockwave-flash"allowFullScreen="true"swLiveConnect="true"pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"> </embed><P>I'm hoping you've got a clear picture surrounding the first of these two priorities - how and where we drive software adoption, and focus our commercial efforts.<P>So now I'd like to talk about the linkages - while also addressing one of our biggest strategic challenges, our scale.<P> <B>Selling Scale</B><br> First, why is scale a challenge for Sun? To be clear, I'm not talking about purchasing scale. As I've said before, we use innovation to drive product profitability, not simply bulk purchasing leverage. The scale to which I'm referring is selling and marketing scale. With Sun's current products, we could be selling to twice the number of customers we currently serve - our products appeal to an audience far greater than our customer base. But we're limited by our size - our sales and partner force has a tenth the resources of our biggest peers.<P>This is a particularly tough problem to solve in the midst of an economic downturn. Growing customers while reducing employees is an obvious challenge.<P>But it's also a huge opportunity. We have fewer than 100,000 customers worldwide. Using just one example, there are more than 10,000,000 MySQL users globally - reaching an additional 1% of them could more than double our customer base. The question is obviously how - we know we're relevant to those users, but we and our partners can't very well put sales reps on airplanes to visit all 10,000,000.<P>To answer that question, I'd like to examine what may seem like a tangential topic... the search business.<P> <B>Discovering Intent</B><br>Now, why is the search business so valuable? Because it's an exceptionally efficient means of harvesting intentionality - <a href=""><img style="margin: 5px 10px 10px 0px; cursor: pointer; width: 160px; float: right;" src="http://www.rama-arya.com/image_library/egypt/pyramids_sphinx1.jpg"/> </a> if a consumer is searching for "flights to Cairo," the odds are good she's in the market for a trip to Egypt. That intent represents a ton of value for the airlines, hotel chains and car rental companies that serve travelers to Egypt. Whoever first recognizes that intent can broker a relationship between the traveler and those businesses, and charge a healthy toll for the privilege (that's the heart of on-line advertising). A discount airfare to Cairo, presented alongside the results of a "flights to Cairo" search, has a far higher likelihood of generating a ticket purchase than an unqualified billboard or ad in a newspaper. It's easier to find needles in haystacks when the haystacks are sorted by needle count.<P>Now I want you to think about the model I've described in these last few entries - Sun's business starts with exceptionally high volume free software adoption, literally millions of assets each day. What does that have to do with search?<P>Well, what is a customer telling us when they download software? Depending upon what they're downloading, they're telling us about what they value. If you're downloading MySQL or ZFS, you're more than likely storing data. If you're downloading OpenOffice.org, you're likely to create, save and maybe print documents. If you download VirtualBox, our virtualization software, you're telling us you work with multiple operating systems. An enormous stream of this kind of data funnels into Sun every day - signaling intent from customers spanning every corner of the world's technology market. That's the foundation of our analytical marketing activities.<P>Individuals and organizations opt-in to tell Sun, by what they download, what they're intending to do - which gives Sun a unique vantage point surrounding what comes next. If your company is downloading Lustre, the leading parallel file system for supercomputing, the odds are good you're on your way to building a supercomputing facility. Sun uniquely optimizes our solutions around Lustre, and we target those offers to an obviously interested user community. <a href="http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/resources/hpcsystems/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; cursor: pointer; height: 150px; float: left;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/horns.jpg"/> </a> This is one reason we've been <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2009-03/sunflash.20090316.1.xml">growing</A> in the supercomputing market. We use software innovation to drive preference for Lustre - the majority of top supercomputing sites now use it. We target our product and service development to optimize for facilities using Lustre. And we target our selling and marketing activities around users that identify themselves to us - by downloading Lustre, or whitepapers and content related to it.<P> But as I've said, the majority of free software users aren't going to be building million dollar supercomputers, nor will they be issuing million dollar software purchase orders. And therein lies a new opportunity - one that helps us address our scaling challenges, as well.<P><B>Introducing Sun's Cloud</B><br>That opportunity is for Sun's Cloud - which we just announced today - to deliver commercial network services to the entire free software community.<P>Let's start with what we announced today.<P>This morning, Dave Douglas, the SVP of our Cloud Computing business, <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/events/communityone/index.jsp">announced</a> we're building the <A HREF="http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/03/17/Sun_enters_the_cloud_1.html">Sun Cloud</A>, atop open source platforms - from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish. With more than 4,000 developers hard at work on these enabling elements, and a twenty year history of network scale software innovation, we're very comfortable with our technology lead. By building on open source, we're also able to radically reduce our costs by avoiding proprietary storage and networking products.<P>Second, we announced the <A HREF="http://kenai.com/projects/suncloudapis/pages/Home">API's and file formats for Sun's Cloud will all be open</A>, delivered under a Creative Commons License. That means developers can freely stitch our and their cloud services into mass market products, without fear of lock-in or litigation from the emerging proprietary cloud vendors.<P>Third, unlike our peers, we also announced our cloud will be available for deployment behind corporate firewalls - that we'll commercialize our public cloud by instantiating it in private datacenters for those customers who can't, due to regulation, security or business constraints, use a public cloud. We recognize that workloads subject to fiduciary duty or regulatory scrutiny won't move to public clouds - if you can't move to the cloud, we'll move the cloud to you.<P><B>The Developing Cloud</B><br>How will developers use the cloud? Let me give you a very basic example - inside Sun, we're just now rolling out a version of OpenOffice extended for the cloud. If you take a look at the File menu in this picture, you'll see menu items that don't exist in your version - <a href="http://www.openoffice.org"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; cursor: pointer; float: left;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/SaveToCloud.jpg"/> </a> but will exist in Sun's distribution. "Save to Cloud," and "Open From Cloud..." will enable OpenOffice users to use our public cloud to store and retrieve documents from the network, rather than their PC. We're in beta deployment inside Sun as we speak, and with around 3,000,000 new users joining the OpenOffice community every week, the opportunity to deliver this as a public service, to nearly 200,000,000 users, adn their employers, is really exciting.<P>The same applies to, say, VirtualBox - our desktop virtualization product, used by millions of users across the world. VB users will see a new feature later this year, offering an upload service to those wishing to archive or run multiple OS/application stacks - in Sun's Cloud. Those users have already told us they run multiple OS's - now that we know their intent, delivering a cloud to add value is a simple step forward. The same will apply to Glassfish and NetBeans, whose adoption helps us discover and recruit application developers - who might have a similar interest in running and/or storing apps in the cloud.<P> <a href="http://www.virtualbox.org"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; cursor: pointer;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/VirtualBox_Graphics.jpg"/> </a> </p> So in addition to offering the basic infrastructure services developers have come to expect (storage, compute, bandwidth), we'll be bringing tens of millions of free software users a library of cloud services and design patterns - designed to enhance the value they derive from the underlying software, while encouraging community development around open clouds. And all this will be based on what users have already told us they're interested in. <P><B>The Network is the Computer</B><br>To me, this is the embodiment of Sun's vision statement, the Network is the Computer. The breadth and quality of Sun's open source software is well known, and has created a user community that numbers in the hundreds of millions across the globe. The evolution of Sun's cloud and cloud services, from remote storage to remote execution, will allow us to grow our market, and the value we deliver to customers - even in, and perhaps amplified by the economic downturn. Clouds are just as interesting to students and startups as they are to Fortune 500 customers. If you're interested in Sun's Cloud, just head over to sun.com/cloud.<P>The network is the computer has always been one of the most powerful statements describing the future of the technology we build. For the first time, we expect to translate that mission statement to our business model, investing in the free software community to grow our market, and leveraging the network to grow the value we deliver - to a market, and partner community, far larger than Sun.<P>And in that connection between adoption and commercial opportunity, we see near limitless opportunity, measured only by the scale of adoption we can achieve in a world where bandwidth is as pervasive as electricity, and free software adoption continues to accelerate.<P>With that said, this brings to a close this discussion of who Sun is, and where we're headed. I hope it's been useful. We're a very simple business, we strive to do three basic things. To drive free software across the world, both because it's good for the planet and innovation, and it's good for our business. Second, to deliver the world's most compelling technologies to captivate developers and deployers, alike. And finally, to put those assets to work in creating opportunities in the cloud, for our customers, our partners and for Sun, as well.<P>Thank you for your time and attention, I'll see you next time. <P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/commercial_innovation_3_of_4</id> <title type="html">Sun's Network Innovations (3 of 4)</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/commercial_innovation_3_of_4"/> <published>2009-03-11T22:26:00-07:00</published> <updated>2009-03-12T09:28:58-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="crossbow" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="lustre" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opennetworking" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="openstorage" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="solaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sun" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">As I referenced in my <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/three_things_on_sun_in">prior entry</A>, I'm reviewing Sun's three major strategic imperatives, and our progress going in to next fiscal year. Our strategic imperatives, in order, are:<P><b>1. Technology Adoption<br>2. Commercial Innovation<br>3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.<br></b><P>This entry focuses on the second, <B>Commercial Innovation</B>, and reviews our core revenue products, services and strategies.<P> <embed src="http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/1640183659?isVid=1" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"flashVars="playerID=1640183659&@videoPlayer=15410951001&servicesURL=http://services.brightcove.com/services&cdnURL=http:/ /admin.brightcove.com&domain=embed&autoStart=false&"base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj"width="486" height="322" seamlesstabbing="false"type="application/x-shockwave-flash"allowFullScreen="true"swLiveConnect="true"pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"> </embed><p> <a href="http://glassfish.java.net"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 100px; cursor: pointer;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/concepcion/resource/glassfish_logo_large_transparent.png" /> </a> </p> By now, you understand Sun's approach to growing the market - driving adoption of key technologies drives Sun's addressable market. Once you're using one of our fundamental technologies, Sun's innovations focused on those technologies are relevant to you. The beauty of free distribution is you don't have to pick customers, they pick you.<P>Three very valuable markets emerge from this adoption. I'll focus on the first two here, the products and services we sell.<P>The first market is obvious. Software isn't downloaded onto air. <p> <a href="http://www.sun.com/servers/hpc/SunConstellationPreview.jsp"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; width: 300px; cursor: pointer;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/X2100.png" /> </a> </p><B>Systems Innovations</b><br>There's always some system platform underneath software - sure, it might be a laptop in a dorm room*, but it's just as likely to be into a Fortune 500 company, attached to servers, storage and networking equipment. All told, this datacenter systems market is more than $150b annually. <P>And in this datacenter market we build exceptional systems - screaming fast entry level servers, all the way up to the most efficient mainframe class systems. We build super fast storage, from our new flash based platforms to eco-efficient tape and archive solutions. We also build the world's fastest networking switches, powering the planet's largest supercomputers. We cover the entire spectrum, and work with the smartest partners in the industry to serve customers across the globe. Although we focus on our own technologies, like Java, MySQL and Lustre, we also optimize for VMware, Microsoft's Windows and we're generally recognized to run Oracle better than anyone on the planet. <P><p> <a href="http://www.sun.com/servers/hpc/SunConstellationPreview.jsp"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; height: 150px; cursor: pointer;" src="http://www.sun.com/images/zot/zot_scs_system.jpg" /> </a> </p> Now, you heard me call these our Systems products, not just hardware products. These systems are obviously more than just naked components, they're engineered with remote management and monitoring, component redundancy, integrated virtualization, and on board storage and networking. That's why our margins are higher than the industry's***. I'm very proud of our Systems team, they are the most talented platform engineers on earth, and they earn consistently stellar <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/chhandomay/category/Hardware+Reviews">reviews</A>. <P>But where's this first market headed? Here's where it's going to get interesting.<P><B>Datacenter Systems Convergence - Who Plays? Wins?</b><br>As I've said before, general purpose microprocessors and operating systems are now fast enough to eliminate the need for special purpose devices. That means you can build a router out of a server - notice you cannot build a server out of a router, try as hard as you like. The same applies to storage devices.<P>To demonstrate this point, we now build our entire line of storage systems from general purpose server parts, including Solaris and ZFS, our open source file system. This allows us to innovate in software, where others have to build custom silicon or add cost. We are planning a similar line of networking platforms, based around the silicon and software you can already find in our portfolio. <P><a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 100px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a></P> We believe both the storage and networking industry's proprietary approach, and their gross profit streams, are now open to those us with general purpose platforms. That's good news for customers, and for Sun.<P> At the heart of this convergence is Solaris - enabled by technologies such as ZFS (around which we're building our entire storage line), and Crossbow (around which you'll see us build some very compelling networking products). Technologists interested in ZFS and Crossbow can visit <A HREF="http://www.opensolaris.org">OpenSolaris.org</A>, or request an OpenSolaris CD (click the CD image). <P>I've provided a picture here to make the point - these three industries (servers, storage and networking), are converging, driven by the raw performance of the underlying server operating system and microprocessor. <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; cursor: pointer;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/DatacenterGraphic.jpg" /> </a> </p> That means these adjacent markets are all open to Sun and the Solaris community. Leveraging inexpensive, general purpose components is one big advantage for us, but there are others - using a general purpose OS allows us to easily embrace specialized components (from <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/storage/flash/">flash memory</A> to GPU's), or adapt to new storage or networking protocols entirely in software. The underlying OS and server are so fast, these extensions and enhancements are simple feature updates, and ones we can leverage across servers, and storage and networking.<P>This isn't to say the networking or storage companies don't have their own operating systems. They do, but in both instances, they're proprietary, have tiny volumes, and despite paying lip service to open standards and the Linux community, their core operating software is unavailable to developers, it's truly proprietary. Their niche OS's also lack cross industry support, which is why our Solaris OEM agreements with IBM, Dell, Intel, Fujitsu and HP are so important to our end customers - they know they'll never be locked in. Today's storage and networking vendors remind me of the server vendors in the late 1990's - with expensive software bolted to expensive hardware. Ultimately forced open by innovation. <P>At Sun, open source isn't for servers. Open source is for datacenters. <P><B>Where's the Money?</b><br>Let's also look at the financial backdrop to this convergence. For these networking and storage vendors, entering the server market means suffering profit degradation - the server industry is vastly more competitive than the storage and networking marketplace.<P>On the other hand, as Sun grows into the storage and networking markets, we're thrilled with higher profit margins. We're unique among platform vendors in being able to deliver Servers, Storage, Networking and Virtualization on our own terms, very well integrated and at our own prices. How will we differentiate against our peers? <p> <a href="http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/x6440/gallery/index.xml?p=1&s=2"><img style= "margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; width: 200px; float: right;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/C10_Little.jpg"></a> </a> </p> Simple. Integration, innovation, and as a result of building atop open source and commodity components, we are the low cost supplier. They, on the other hand, will be forced into all kinds of contorted partnerships and complex reselling arrangements. They may ship the boxes, but they won't control the platform software - or profit streams.<P>How is our Systems business doing? The portions of this business sensitive to software adoption, primarily the low end of all these products, is doing quite well, growing double digits**. The weakness in our Systems business is really focused on the high end. This reflects really two things - the first is the deferrability of high end system purchases. Our high end business was up 20% a little over a year ago, it was down more than 20% in the December quarter of 2008 - across the industry, customers are holding off on big ticket purchases. <P>The second, and arguably more important headwind was a decision made back in the 1990's to cancel Solaris on Intel, in the belief it would protect Sun's SPARC hardware business. Conversely, that mistake destroyed a generation of Solaris developers, and accelerated the rise of alternatives to traditional SPARC hardware. And now you understand why we prioritize developers - they are the seeds from which great forests grow. If you don't water the roots, the trees wither.<P>But how do you make money giving software away to developers? Well, let's switch gears, and talk about Software and Services. <P><B>When Free is Too Expensive</b><br>One of my favorite customer stories relates to an American company that did nearly 30% of its yearly revenue on Christmas Day. They were a mobile phone company, whose handsets appeared under Christmas trees, opened en masse and provisioned on the internet within about a 48 hour period. When we won the bid to supply their datacenter, their CIO gave me the purchase order on the condition I gave him my home phone number. He said, "If I have any issues on Christmas, I want you on the phone making sure every resource available is solving the problem." I happily provided it (and then made sure I had my direct staff's home numbers). Christmas came and went, no problems at all.<P>A year later, he was issuing a purchase order to Sun for several of our software products. To have a little fun with him (and the Sun sales rep), I told him before he passed me the purchase order that the products were all open source, freely available for download. <p> <a href="http://www.sun.com/download/index.jsp"><img style="margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/DownloadTiles.jpg" /> </a> </p> He looked at me, then at his rep, and said "What? Then why am I paying you a million dollars?" I responded, "You can absolutely run it for free. You just can't call me on Christmas day, you'll be on your own." He gave me the PO. At the scale he was running, the cost of downtime dwarfed the cost of the license and support.<P>Numerically, most developers and technology users have more time than money. Most readers of this blog are happy to run unsupported software, and we are very happy to supply it. For a far smaller population, the price of downtime radically exceeds the price of a license or support - for some, the cost of downtime is measured in millions per minute. If you're tracking packages or fleets of aircraft, running an emergency response network or a trading floor, you almost always have more money than time. And that's our business model, we offer utterly exceptional service, support and enterprise technologies to those that have more money than time. It's a good business.<P>All in/all up, our Software business is among the fastest growing businesses at Sun. I've attached our latest financial summary at the end of this blog. We span network identity (built with the OpenDS community), application infrastructure (biult with Glassfish and OpenESB), data management (built with MySQL, ZFS and Lustre), embedded software (such as Java, and the emerging JavaFX), alongside our core operating system and virtualization software (Solaris, OpenSolaris and VirtualBox). These open source platforms generate, alongside the services attached to them, over a billion dollars a year, making Sun by far and away the world's largest open source software company. (For those that continue to ask if we make money with Java, the answer is yes, it's on a ramp to hit about $250m this year - one of our best businesses - and that's just Java on consumer devices, excluding servers). <P>Every day, these products are being adopted globally, driving university curriculum, corporate trials and design wins, influencing skills, even <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/change_has_come_to_america">supporting Presidential campaigns</A>. We know not every download yields revenue or users, but they do yield awareness and trials - a small, but intensely valuable portion of which yields revenue and profit. Our sales reps see the purchase orders at the point of value, not at the point of download. The revenue's recognized over the period of the Service contract - a business model the rest of the industry, at least for mass market products, will inevitably adopt. Fighting free and open software, like fighting free news or free search, is like fighting gravity - and btw, gravity gets a lot stronger during economic downturns. <P><B>Conclusion</b><br>And in a nutshell, that's how we monetize adoption - with targeted, high value innovations. <P><a href="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/earnings_releases/Q209_SLD.pdf"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Q209_SLD.jpg" /> </a> </p> <P>We deliver the world's most effective and efficient Systems portfolio, spanning x86 and SPARC servers, storage and networking. And the world's most appealing Software and Services products, spanning embedded software to high performance file systems. <P>We call all these products network innovations. I know that defies industry categorization, but that's what innovation's all about, defying categorization.<P>I've only touched on two of the three opportunities opened by mass adoption. And with that as a teaser, I invite you to return for the final blog entry, talking about what might be the most valuable of them all - a market enabled by the innovations described above, and set to transform the entire marketplace. Embodying the phrase, The Network is the Computer.<P>See you then. <P>-----------------------<p><font size="1">* and before you dismiss those users, some of the world's biggest internet companies/datacenters were started on laptops in dorm rooms... a trend I expect to accelerate.</font><p><font size="1">** Sun's x86 systems business, for example, grew over 11% last quarter, when both HP and IBM's comparable businesses shrank in double digits. For those wondering "how do you differentiate?", just ask our customers.</font><p><font size="1">*** Compared to other industry standard server vendors.</font><P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/step_one_adoption</id> <title type="html">Technology Adoption (2 of 4)</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/step_one_adoption"/> <published>2009-03-06T08:35:00-08:00</published> <updated>2009-03-06T09:09:04-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="crossbow" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="glassfish" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="netbeans" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensparc" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="solaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sun" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">As I referenced in my <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/three_things_on_sun_in">prior entry</A>, I'm reviewing Sun's three major strategic imperatives, and our progress going in to next fiscal year. Our strategic imperatives, in order, are:<P><b>1. Technology Adoption<br>2. Commercial Innovation<br>3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.<br></b><P><embed src="http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/1640183659?isVid=1"bgcolor="#FFFFFF"flashVars="playerID=1640183659&@videoPlayer=14911715001&servicesURL=http://services.brightcove.com/services&cdnURL=http://admin.brightcove.com&domain=embed&autoStart=false&"base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj"width="486" height="322" seamlesstabbing="false"type="application/x-shockwave-flash"allowFullScreen="true"swLiveConnect="true"pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed><P>This entry focuses on the first, Technology Adoption. Adoption is a non-economic phenomena, no money is spent, only time - yet it has extreme financial consequences. Let me give you an example.<P>I was with a big customer of ours last year, and reading through my account briefing before the meeting, I knew we were doing well. An analysis of their download activity showed they were heavy users of Solaris and OpenSolaris, and they had a large internal community of MySQL users, as well. In the meeting, their CIO said "we love where Solaris is headed." I then asked if we could help with MySQL, and he said... "I banned it." <P>Not exactly a buying signal.<P>I was stunned. I asked, "why?" He responded, "Oracle is our global standard, and with 20,000 developers, people need to follow the rules." I said we had a very good relationship with Oracle, and started talking about how fast Oracle runs against our new Open Storage products. <A HREF="http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 120px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/MySQL_Logo.jpg"></A></A> Until he interrupted me, "...but my ban failed." What? "We hire lots of people out of college every year, and they all come in knowing MySQL. All my prototypes are written to MySQL, and now I have a big base of MySQL apps I don't want to port, and a bunch of MySQL programmers I don't want to retrain. So I'd like a commercial relationship."<P>In a nutshell, that's adoption in action. Change in IT isn't just a top down phenomenon - it's more often bottom up*.<P><B>Innovation vs. Reselling Innovation</b><br>What's the cost of missing that adoption? For Sun to resell a 1-way x86 server running Microsoft's Windows or Red Hat yields (at best) a 10% gross profit margin. Very few companies have the scale to survive on those margins. More to the point, when you resell someone else's products, your customer relationship isn't built with the CIO or technology directors, it's built with their <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_auction">reverse auction</A> web site. For technology companies, the same applies to reselling any product you don't own - it's impossible to differentiate with anything more than a cheaper price. A price your supplier can, and will always, undercut.<P>Alternatively, when a user picks our products - when they build their storage on ZFS, their network on <A HREF="http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=1480">Crossbow</A>, or their application on MySQL, independent of whether they've paid, they've created an opportunity for Sun - going forward, there's only upside. It's called positive option value.<P>Not to dip into finance 101, when the <A HREF="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/npv.asp">net present value</A> of a lifetime revenue cycle exceeds the value of a one time purchase, a product or service that initiates the payment stream is either freely distributed (if it has no marginal cost, like software), or <A HREF="http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/03/subsidies-follow-att-into-netbook-market.ars">subsidized</A> (if it has a hard cost). That's why you see so many free credit cards, free checking account, free mobile phones, free month's rent, free social networking, etc. In the technology world, free is the new black.<P><B>Free Markets</b><br>That's also why the internet's most valuable brands are *all* free - Amazon, Google, EBay, Skype, Yahoo!, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Baidu, TenCent, etc. Those brands reach more and have greater affinity than just about any other consumer brands. And in the technology marketplace, Linux, Java, MySQL, Firefox, Apache, Eclipse, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org, <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/openstorage/entry/opensolaris_features_demo">OpenSolaris</A>, the same applies - free is a universal price, requires no currency translation, and reaches the longest tail of the market.<P>Now, could Amazon charge you to shop? Could your bank charge you to open an account? Google charge you to search? Could Sun charge people to download MySQL or OpenOffice.org? Sure, we could also destroy those brands in a matter of days. If you're not free, by definition you miss serving those that can't afford, or aren't ready to pay - which means your audience is capped, or <em>destroyed</em> if your competition is already free.<P>Microsoft's the only company I didn't include in the above list - and although I consider them a stupendously great brand, they're the only company that can really approximate free while making money on the distribution of their products. The fact is they're bundled on almost every PC across the planet, and appear "free" to the users who use those PC's - they've amassed immense power with their distribution, and few users believe they're paying for Windows when they buy a personal computer. <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 92px;" src="http://www.tortdeform.com/archives/newspaper.jpg"/> </a> </p> Thus, to developers (Sun's target market) with Windows PC's, Microsoft's product are, in effect, already free. (As an aside, notice Microsoft inexorably <A HREF="https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx">moving toward free</A> distribution, too, to reach new users - at some point, you can't bundle every product on every computer, it'd be like printing a Sunday edition of the newspaper every day of the week).<P>This is exactly why we freely distribute our key software assets all over the world - if we didn't, users and developers might pick someone else's free product (or simply use the one they assume to be free). And if they picked someone else's product on which to build their business or their application, Sun becomes a reseller - which isn't our mission or business model. It's a free market, in every sense.<P>The customer I referenced in my first entry <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 100px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> </p> that said, "I haven't visited Sun in five years, but all of a sudden you seem to matter to my developers" was saying he was seeing exactly that, a lot more of our products used by his developers - from VirtualBox to MySQL, Glassfish to ZFS. For some users, and nearly all developers, budgets aren't measured in dollars, they're measured in time and attention - if you want those audiences to spend their time and attention with you, you have to earn it. If you earn it, a preference forms. For Sun, we drive that preference over our competition, primarily proprietary alternatives.<P><B>Our Products are Our Ads</b><br>Now, the words "driving preference" are used by the advertising industry when talking about branding. Businesses brand or advertise to drive awareness of or preference for their products. In the case of a Nike or Toyota, both have to spend fortunes to "buy media," or acquire the ad space (or airtime) through which they'll present, free of charge to consumers, the images or content they feel best represents their brands. <P>Why doesn't Facebook advertise? Because Facebook itself is a branding experience. Using Facebook drives preference for Facebook. And their audience, in users, outreaches just about every media company on earth. It would make no sense for them to buy media, they are media.<P><p> <a href="http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 30px;" src="http://www.netbeans.org/images/visual-guidelines/NB-logo-single.jpg" /> </a> </p> For the audiences Sun cares about, those building, deploying or buying technology, we've got a similar reach. By being freely distributed, our products build their own audiences. And using the products, from Glassfish to ZFS or NetBeans, creates a branding experience (and a wildly positive one, if we're doing our jobs well). So why don't we advertise in traditional outlets? Well, every day, the number of people using our products, getting that positive branding experience, eclipses nearly all major newspapers globally, combined. <P>By proliferating Sun innovations, even encouraging derivatives that will never drive revenue to Sun, we are creating preference for open source, awareness of Sun as an innovator, and displacing proprietary vendors that can't build comparable audiences. That preference has value to us, and to the broader communities in which we participate. The value spans awareness, market penetration, skills development, ecosystem expansion - a healthy community is a growing community.<P>How else is adoption or preference valuable? Volume adoption attracts application developers, and can drive tipping effects - once one independent software vendor, or ISV, picks your platform, others that work with that ISV follow suit. If you do a good job, you lead an avalanche of ISV's to pick your platform - which makes it more appealing to end users. That's why Red Hat has such a durable Linux model - once Oracle picked Red Hat as the Linux to which they'd first certify Oracle's database, the ISV's that relied on Oracle certified only to Red Hat, which tipped the market to Red Hat so strongly that not even Oracle has been able to undo that grip.<P>So adoption drives the ecosystem, which drives more adoption and more expansion... you get the idea. It's a virtuous cycle, a cycle that starts with volume adoption.<P><B>What Adoption Looks Like</b><br>So what does "Adoption" look like? Here's a picture, which shows the ramp we're seeing from free software adoption across the world for some of our key datacenter assets. <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; cursor: pointer; height: 300px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Downloads.jpg"/> </a> </p> For competitive reasons, I won't specify which products are shown, but suffice it to say we're very happy with the ramp, and we love great product reviews - that's what drives the spikes. The troughs are weekends. Bear in mind these are datacenter assets (like Glassfish and OpenSolaris), not consumer runtimes (like Java or OpenOffice.org), so these downloads influence datacenter design. Every day, our software is working hard to drive preference in startups, in government agencies, dorm rooms, ISV's, fortune 100 IT shops, everywhere the internet reaches. Free products reach everyone interested in them, no barriers.<P>On the consumer side, OpenOffice.org, which certainly promotes Sun's vision of open standards and data formats, reaches nearly three million new users - every week. Adding them to a user base we estimate to be between 150 and 200 million users. Talk about global circulation.<P>Our products are our brands and one of our most effective means of driving design wins - in front of users, developers and OEM's. In markets as diverse as high performance computing and grid scheduling, web databases, application infrastructure and desktop virtualization. Free distribution and access to source code is our investment in the global <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/japan_opensolaris_user_group_030609">developer community</A>. We invest with our code, our ideas and time, and we promote and encourage derivatives. We gain by reaching people we'd otherwise never reach - and earning their attention and engagement. Even if we're never paid, that's positive option value.<P>Another way of looking at adoption are these "pink dot" maps - they show us where our products are gaining users via opt-in registration. My favorite dots on the map shown are in places we clearly have no sales coverage - I'd like to say hello to our users on the Falkland Islands, thank you for choosing Solaris :)<P><p> <a href="http://sysnet.sunwarp.net/maps/?lat=38.06539235133249&lng=-97.119140625&zoom=4&mtype=Sat"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; height: 360px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Adoption.jpg"/> </a> </p> What's the value of all that adoption? Like the value of search, shopping, or opening a bank account, there's no instantaneous value beyond the fact you've chosen to invest your time and energy in our ecosystem, and not our competition's. At global scale, that makes us an enormously tough competitor for proprietary companies, or those without true innovation. For example, to get a sense for what our proprietary storage competitors are facing everywhere around the globe, Google the phrase, "<A HREF="http://www.google.com/search?q=love+zfs&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a">love ZFS</A>".<P>But as with all free business models, the real value arises in what comes after free - and that's my teaser to get you to read the next blog entry, focused on our Commercial Innovations.<P>Thanks, again, for reading, watching and commenting.<P> --------------------------------- <p><font size="1">* as I often say to groups of CIO's, "which one of you gave permission to your employees to search on Google?" No one ever raises their hand :)</font></p><p><font size="1">And to my readers/viewers for whom English isn't your first language... I'm doing my best to talk more slowly. I will redouble those efforts in the next video... thank you for watching!</font></p></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/three_things_on_sun_in</id> <title type="html">Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4)</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/three_things_on_sun_in"/> <published>2009-03-02T23:33:00-08:00</published> <updated>2009-03-02T23:35:25-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="microsystems" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="solaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sun" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">We've been making a fair number of announcements recently - on both the product and the partnering front. That's generated a lot of interest, and a fair number of questions. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to deliver this overview and the upcoming focused discussions on what makes Sun tick in a video format. Let me know if this is useful, or what else we can do to keep you informed via the comment field at the bottom.<P><embed src="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/6442572001?isVid=1&publisherID=1460825906" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashVars="@videoPlayer=14564124001&playerID=6442572001&domain=embed&" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj" width="486" height="412" seamlesstabbing="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" swLiveConnect="true" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed> <P> We're approaching the end of our fiscal year, and given all the swirl in the economy, I thought it worthwhile to restate where Sun's headed as a company, to let customers, partners, employees and investors see and understand where we're headed. Clarity's always useful, doubly so in times of uncertainty. <P>Let me start by joining the chorus of those worried about the global economy. I am routinely talking to customers now partially owned by governments, whose share prices have declined 95% or more, whose balance sheets and basic business models are under extraordinary duress. Like every business, our health is a derivative of our customers', and to that end, we've got our challenges - sure, <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/innovation_loves_a_crisis">innovation loves a crisis</A>, but only after customers have stepped out from under their desks.<P>The glass isn't only half empty. I'm also seeing customers who've never had it better, from media startups and telecommunications firms, to government agencies flush with new funding - but they're certainly a cheerful minority.<P>Sun is privileged to have an exceptionally strong balance sheet, over $3 billion in cash, and a nearly two decade history of generating positive cash flow. We've also got a set of technologies and people that continue to play an ever more vital role in the economy. Sun's products help companies grow and help them consolidate, and they help governments stimulate the economy, as well. From building bridges to automating health care, government stimulus will undoubtedly drive technology investment, and we're well positioned to participate globally.<P>Which is all to say, I'm neither worried about the role information technology will play in the economy, nor am I worried about the relevance of Sun's offerings. I'm not worried about the future, I'm focused on its arrival date.<P>So I'm going to divide my comments on Sun's future into three or four blog entries, of which this is the first. You're going to see an accelerating series of announcements over the coming year, from amplifying our open source storage offerings, to building out an equivalent portfolio of products in the networking space; from the addition of new and potentially surprising Solaris and MySQL OEM's, to our newest cloud offerings and startup programs. I want to put all this in context, to be as clear as possible about our priorities and market approach, and help everyone understand both the parts and the sum of the parts.<P>Let's get on with it. <P>In my view, we have a very simple business - when I talk about Sun, I talk about us needing to do "only three things."<P><b>1. Recruit every developer on earth to use our software or services.</b><P>This is a strategic activity, not a financial one, so don't look for revenue here. I'll devote an entire entry to understanding the motivations and mechanisms driving technology adoption, and to discussing the varied audiences we target. As the head of developer technologies from a very large customer said to me last week over dinner, "I haven't visited Sun in five years, but all of a sudden you seem to matter to my developers." I'll help parse that statement in my next entry.<P><b>2. Deliver the world's most compelling commercial offerings</b> - focused primarily, but not exclusively, on deployers of the technologies whose adoption we're driving. <P>Our software and service products target those that find free to be a more expensive alternative than commercially supported, for whom the cost of downtime exceeds the price of a commercial license. That's a small fraction of the planet, but it's a lucrative one. On the systems side of the house, our products reach across rack and blade servers, storage and networking systems - basically, everything to power the cloud. <P>I'll talk about the reliance this business has on developers to drive differentiation, and gross margin dollars, and the competitive advantage such reliance creates as we broaden our market offerings into storage and networking.<P><b>3. Execute the world's most effective selling/service connection between 1. and 2.</b><P>I spend a lot of time talking publicly about the first two points, and very little talking about this last one - in part, because it's been a work in progress, and because the scale of our sales/services channel has been one of our biggest strategic challenges. <P>But the ordering matters - our first financial priority is to generate free cash flow; our first strategic priority is to grow our available market. When they're in sync, as I believe we are in our Open Storage business right now, you have to beat us in the <A HREF="http://www.google.com/search?site=search%253Fq%253Dlove%252Bzfs%26ie%253Dutf-8%26oe%253Dutf-8%26aq%253Dt%26rls%253Dorg.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial%26client%253Dfirefox-a&hl=en&q=love+zfs&btnG=Search">free software community</A> and then again in front of paying customers. That's a tough combination, especially if you're a proprietary storage vendor that pretends to like free software, so long as it doesn't compete with your products.<P>As you know, simplicity takes a lot of engineering, so it's easy to say "just three things," but I'm not in any way suggesting these tasks are easily accomplished. But our intent is to create, promote, and commercialize the highest quality network innovations. Innovations that captivate developers, and deployers.<P>To understand Sun, you have to understand both, you have to see what drives our financial performance, as well as read our financial statements. Absent both perspectives, you'll miss the bigger picture, the bigger threat, or the bigger opportunity. <P>With this as a backdrop, you should expect me to focus on the points enumerated above in the next few blogs entries. Focusing on today's market, and - independent of the economic slowdown - on tomorrow's.<P>Thanks for reading. <P>(YouTube version of video <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey94FR-xCmk">here</a>)</content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/hp_joins_solaris_community_live</id> <title type="html">HP Joins Solaris Community (Live Free or Die)</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/hp_joins_solaris_community_live"/> <published>2009-02-25T09:00:00-08:00</published> <updated>2009-02-25T09:00:00-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="hp" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="intel" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="nehalem" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="solaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><p> <a href="http://www.maine.edu/"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 120px;" src="http://students.usm.maine.edu/jennifer.lamson/Rev%20War.jpg" /> </a> </p> In 1809, a hero in America's Revolutionary War, General John Stark, was forced to decline an invitation to a military reunion due to ill health. He sent a toast to be read in his absence that began, "Live Free or Die." That phrase is now the official motto of the American state of New Hampshire (where Stark lived), known for a fierce sense of independence (and no income taxes).<P>Hold that thought for a moment. <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 100px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/HP_logo.JPG" /> </a> </p> Today, we're <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/hp/index.jsp">announcing</A> the single biggest and most important OEM/distribution agreement Sun's ever signed for the open source Solaris operating system - through which we'll be joining forces with the world's largest supplier of high volume servers, Hewlett Packard. As a result of the deal, Solaris gains tier 1 status, becoming a peer to Microsoft's Windows among HP's channels and partners. Commercial licenses and support services will be made available across the full breadth of x86 systems HP ships under the Proliant banner. More importantly, we'll both be investing in the innovation, community and marketplace surrounding our jointly delivered platforms - it's all about growing the Solaris market.<P>This relationship brings every major server vendor to the Solaris OEM marketplace, with HP capping a great list of Solaris endorsers that includes Intel, AMD, IBM, Dell and many others. <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/sun_nh_nyt_fin_lr.pdf"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 500px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/HPSunAd.jpg" /> </a> At this stage, we count more than a 1,000 x86 systems supported by Solaris and OpenSolaris, and nearly 8,000 ISV applications. With Intel's Nehalem systems just around the corner, this ensures customers and ISV's looking for a robust, scalable <A HREF="http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 15px 10px 0px; cursor:pointer; width: 80px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/MySQL_Logo.jpg"></A></A>open source <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/Gregp/entry/the_intercloud">cloud operating system</A>, one that leverage every ounce of x86 performance, will see Solaris - alongside ZFS, DTrace, MySQL, Java and a whole array of embedded XVM virtualization support - from every x86 OEM on earth. Congratulations, HP, it's great to have you on the team!<P>Now, returning to the thought above, more than a century after General Stark's toast, New Hampshire found itself home to one of the earliest, and most effective software teams ever built, the Unix Group at Digital Equipment Corporation. In the 1980's, they adopted the same motto for their beloved Unix operating system, "Live Free or Die." That phrase has since become synonymous with software independence, innovation and intellectual property freedom - it's a way of life for an enormous portion of the free software company.<P>And it was with that exact spirit that Sun broke from the traditional Unix vendors in the late 1990's, freeing the Solaris operating system from ties to the underlying hardware on which it ran - and from traditional notions of proprietary software development. We made the source code available under a free software license, we invested heavily in communities outside of Sun (both Intel and AMD have been fabulous technical partners), and we drew customers and partners into the mix. Today, I am officially calling that transition complete, as we announce the most significant Solaris OEM agreement we've ever signed. Under the terms of the agreement, HP is joining the OpenSolaris community, optimizing its performance for HP servers and storage, while simultaneously investing to expand our penetration across a variety of new markets, from health care and manufacturing, to small and medium businesses.<P> <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 100px;" src="http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/images/solaris_medium.jpg" /> </a> </p> From our vantage point, the spirit of "Live free or die" defines the future for all software, not just operating systems. Traditional proprietary software models, like traditional newspaper businesses, will slow as customers move to the cloud. Governments across the world, spurring economic activity with stimulus programs are already <A HREF="http://www.cio.gov.uk/transformational_government/open_source/index.asp">mandating or promoting open source</a> software as a means of driving progress. Live free or die is a spirit spreading choice, technical independence and innovation - the revolution is well underway. <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 100px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> </p> Numerous customers who share this philosophy helped bring the HP/Solaris agreement to fruition. Mark Hurd and I heard (and read) your encouragement directly, and both teams have worked tirelessly for months to craft a comprehensive, robust and effective engagement. On behalf of Sun, to our colleagues at HP, we're looking forward to working together. <P>If you'd like a Solaris CD, just click the image. Live free, indeed. <P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/javafx_hits_100_000_000</id> <title type="html">JavaFX Hits 100,000,000 Milestone!</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/javafx_hits_100_000_000"/> <published>2009-02-13T23:25:04-08:00</published> <updated>2009-03-05T09:05:02-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="adobe" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="air" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="flash" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="flex" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="javafx" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="microsoft" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="silverlight" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">I have some extraordinary news to share. <P> <a href="http://www.javafx.com"><img style="margin: 5px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 60px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/JavaFXLogo.jpg"/></a> As of late this evening, Sun will have shipped its <b>100,000,000th <A HREF="http://javafx.com/">JavaFX</A> runtime</b>. Congratulations, folks! From a standing start in early December last year, JavaFX's download rate makes it the fastest growing RIA platform on the market - demonstrating the fastest adoption of any product Sun has ever shipped.<P> <IMG style="float:right; margin:10px 0px 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; width: 180px;"SRC="http://www.blackberry.com/assets/images/storm_hero.png"></a> The 100,000,000 milestone was reached just in time for us to announce the second phase of our JavaFX strategy, the release of <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/mobile/">JavaFX Mobile</A> at next week's <A HREF="http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/index.shtml">Mobile World Congress</a>. JavaFX Mobile is a runtime identical to JavaFX Desktop, but preconfigured for gizmos with very small memory footprints (like mobile phones). With our newest partners, from <A HREF="http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws">Sony Ericsson</A> to <A HREF="http://www.lge.com/html/gate.html">LG Electronics</A> (and more adding every day), this should add a massive breadth of mobile runtimes to the converged JavaFX count - and create even more opportunity for Java developers.<P>Why such a fast uptake? The Java platform continues to provide the world's most complete open source platform for a rich internet - supported by the world's largest developer community. JavaFX allows Sun to reach beyond our traditional base to creative professionals and non-coders working with audio, video and high performance graphics. And most importantly - JavaFX allows content owners to bypass potentially hostile browsers, to install applications <em>directly on user desktops and phones</em>. You'll see that phenomenon heat up in 2009, accelerated by the emergence of "AppStores" on every device connected to the internet.<P>What's our view of the overall marketplace? Here are a few thoughts.<P>First, freely distributed, open source software will continue to create enormous revenue opportunities for those that understand the underlying business model - as an example, the Java business for Sun, last quarter, delivered more than $67m in billings, up nearly 50% year over year. On an annualized basis, that means the Java <b>client</b> business (as distinct from the Java server business) is now a multi-hundred million dollar business, opening doors for Sun, and the Java community, across the planet. All built on freely available runtimes and source code. Free as in beer, free as in speech, and free as in market.<P><A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00154JDAI/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=2733312175&ref=pd_sl_94gezpav8a_e" ><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; width: 180px;"SRC="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/digital/fiona/general/Kindle_C1_03._V10214354_.gif"></a> Second, devices are becoming functionally equivalent - what you can do with Flash is comparable to Silverlight, and again comparable to JavaFX. We each have our specialty, but over the long haul, my view is adoption rates and business models will be a greater driver of success than the technologies themselves. Why? Because if you're Amazon building the extraordinary <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00154JDAI/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=2733312175&ref=pd_sl_94gezpav8a_e">Kindle 2</A>, it matters that Sun won't put its business model between you and your customers - you want the technology you select to enable <em>your</em> business, not your supplier's, while enabling access to the world's largest developer community. (That said, <em>must</em> you use JavaFX or Flash or Silverlight to be a part of the rich internet future? Well, no - Apple used Objective-C for the iPhone, after all, completely discrediting the purist notion that if the app isn't written with a web scripting language, it isn't fashion forward).<P> <A HREF="http://www.java.com" ><IMG style="float:right; margin:10px 0px 10px 10px; cursor:pointer; width: 80px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/java_smi_logo_rgb.jpg"></a> Finally, the consumer electronics market is going to be infinitely more vibrant and competitive than the relatively stagnant personal computer market. Having just seen a host of new Java devices, from automobile dashboards and <A HREF="http://www.blu-raydisc.com">BluRay DVD</A> players, to set top boxes, picture frames, VOIP phones and new consumer electronics... the economy might be cooling down, but the RIA market is definitely heating up.<P>The Java platform is only growing in importance and value, across billions of devices. At Sun, we're planning on maintaining Java's ubiquity as the number one runtime environment, backed by the world's most price performant datacenter infrastructure, all powered by Sun's cloud. After all, the network is the computer.<P>So again, congratulations to the team - and the Java community! Now, on to the next 100,000,000! (For those interested, <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/">download JavaFX SDK here</a>.)<P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/q2_fy2009</id> <title type="html">Sun's Q2 Financial Results</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/q2_fy2009"/> <published>2009-02-06T17:45:00-08:00</published> <updated>2009-02-06T17:45:38-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="microsystems" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sparc" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sun" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><em>These are my spoken notes from last week's earnings call - rather than recraft them, I figured I'd simply republish. </em> <P>_______________________________<P>And thank you all for joining us this afternoon. <P><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; width: 100px;"SRC="http://www.netbanker.com/Images/glass6.jpg">I'll start with some perspective on our Q2 results and the current climate, then follow-up with commentary on our products disclosure - slides 6 and 7 in the <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/earnings_releases/Q209_SLD.pdf">slide deck</A>. Then I'll turn it over to Mike Lehman (Sun's CFO) for commentary on financial metrics, and an update on the restructuring plan we announced back in November.<P>Overall, results for Q2 were in line with what we expected, as macro worries factored into customer discussions across all geographies. These concerns resulted in decisions related to higher end system purchases being pushed out - so billings were down year over year for SPARC Enterprise Servers, alongside the Storage and Service businesses attached to them, continuing a trend that began about a year ago. With that said, growth in our key areas continued, with Software a high point, and our Open Storage, CMT or "Niagara," and x86 systems businesses all delivering double-digit growth.<P>As we shared with you last quarter, Sun's business can be viewed in two categories, “Traditional” and “Growth," depicted on slide 7. Growth Categories now account for over 1/3rd of Sun's products billings, up from just 23% one year ago, and are continuing to open new opportunities within our existing installed base, and more importantly, far beyond it.<P>On the traditional front, declines in Enterprise SPARC systems are, by and large, the result of purchase delays - and with mission critical systems platforms continuing to age, this business represents significant future upgrade and refresh opportunities. But we were disappointed with the results, and the related effect it had on our storage and attached service offerings. Our tape and archive business out performed the competition, albeit in a declining market, but also represents an attractive base of annuity opportunities going forward.<P>On to the growth businesses. <P>Software was a shining light in Q2 as total software billings grew 21% year over year and 52% sequentially. Java software billings grew 47% year over year, as we continued to monetize our distribution power to the world's client devices, from personal computers, to set top boxes and mobile handsets, and as we began delivery of our new platform, JavaFX, to OEMS across the world. As mobile devices and network enabled consumer devices continue to heat up, we believe the Java platform, running in front of billions of consumers, represents an increasingly attractive business.<P>MySQL and Infrastructure software billings grew 55% year over year on a surge in demand for open source middleware, from identity management and database management, to integration software. In the midst of this economic downturn, discussions related to free and open source software have substantially heated up - this is no longer a peripheral discussion with CIO's - cost reduction related to open source adoption has become a focal point for decision makers across the world.<P>Solaris, Management and Virtualization billings grew sequentially but not year over year, as customers migrated to subscriptions and service offerings and away from traditional licensing. We believe this transition has been largely completed in Q2, and again, positions the Solaris and OpenSolaris platform as one of three surviving operating systems for cloud computing - alongside Microsoft's Windows and Linux. As a result of our assets, from Java and OpenSolaris to MySQL and xVM, Sun is positioned to be the provider of the world's most complete open source software platform - for enterprise computing, and more importantly, for the cloud.<P>Now, on to the Systems side of our business. <P>Billings for our Solaris-based Chip Multi Threading systems (also known as CMT or Niagara platforms) increased over 30% year over year in Q2. Based on Q1 and Q2 FY09 billings, CMT systems have now become a $1.4 billion dollar plus annual business for Sun, growing at significant double digits - and with IBM's Power and HP's Itanium available in only high end configurations, our Niagara platforms stand alone as volume alternatives to customers running IBM's AIX and HP's HPUX.  We continue to broaden our Niagara offerings, most recently with the addition of the T5440, a powerful midrange computer fueled by the growing base of volume Niagara units, in both blade and rack form, complementing our x86 platform offerings.<P>Speaking of which, Sun's family of Intel and AMD-based X64 servers increased 11% year over year in Q2 billings. Blades, which include SPARC, Intel and AMD processor-based systems, delivered another outstanding quarter, growing billings 62% year over year. We believe this performance reflects market share gains across both industry-standard and blade servers, building a footprint that allows for higher margin software, service and storage offerings. <P>To that end, billings for Open Storage Products grew 21% year over year, which reflected, in part, a transition to Sun's <A HREF ="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/">flash-based 7000 family</A>, also known as "Amber Road," around which we're seeing tremendous customer and partner interest. Based on industry standard components and the popular open source ZFS file system, these platforms deliver massive price/performance benefits against proprietary NAS vendors. With more than 2,000 channel partners now trained and certified to sell Amber Road, and with customer buzz among the highest we've ever seen for a new storage product, we have high expectations going forward. This is the first of what will be a complete line of open storage based products, covering the smallest customers, all the way up to mainframe storage.<P>Amber Road also sets us up to broaden our line of appliances - just as the freely distributed ZFS file system creates opportunity and awareness for Sun's open storage offerings, I believe our newly introduced <A HREF="http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=999">Crossbow</A> platform creates similar opportunities for Sun in the networking marketplace. Like the market for traditional storage, the networking marketplace is characterized by very high prices, proprietary software and restrictive hardware platforms - exactly the environment in which open source software and commodity components create choice and competition, welcome changes for customers seeking budgetary and technical relief.<P>To conclude, I'll remind you that tough times create unique opportunity for those who innovate - although we see customers under stress across the world, that pressure is opening their eyes to the alternatives Sun provides, across a wide range of ubiquitous software and systems innovations. Sun can draw upon the most pervasive software brands and developer platforms, the broadest user communities, and among the most powerful products and distribution assets to drive more aggressive growth in the future.<P>_____________________<P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/managing_a_bestseller</id> <title type="html">Managing a Bestseller</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/managing_a_bestseller"/> <published>2009-01-17T23:12:53-08:00</published> <updated>2009-01-18T08:46:22-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="7000" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="bestseller" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="short" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="storage" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="stroking" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sun" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:emc" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:ntap" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zil" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">There are a couple of bookstores in my neighborhood. They could not be more different from one another.<P> <a href=""><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 110px;" src="http://www.rtable.net/images/books1.jpg"/></a> The first is known to focus on best seller lists, to promote popular books, and use displays and traditional retail techniques to drive business. They seem to do well, year in, year out. The other bookstore is more of a community treasure, beloved by the neighborhood, with a focus on the (thoughtful) insights of their staff. Those insights are delivered via small note cards appended to shelving throughout the store, where books are displayed alphabetically, with library-like neutrality.<P>The first store is very market focused, changes with the season, and seems to be quite succesful. The latter store, beloved though it may be, struggles to stay in business.<P><a href="http://www.npr.org"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 110px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/HouseMoney.jpg" /> </a> Now you might consider that an awkward introduction to a discussion of datacenter storage devices, but it was the best I could muster after reading yet another week's worth of horrible economic headlines, dominated by multi-billion dollar losses and bailouts for some of the world's largest corporations. But I (really) don't want to talk about the economy (or the irony of a Wall Street analyst with a sell rating on Sun asking me for a job). Nor do I want to talk about the economics of selling books. I do, however, want to talk about storage and flash memory, far more scintillating topics (to me, anyways).<P> <a href=""><img align="left" style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; cursor: pointer; width: 170px;" src="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/images/zot_abr_box3.gif" /></a> As you're aware, flash memory is making its way into data centers at a very rapid clip. Flash has exceptional performance characteristics, and is generally orders of magnitude faster than a traditional disk drive at responding to requests to read and write information - up to 100's of times faster. It also requires little/no power, dissipates no heat, and can withstand vibration, temperature extremes and shock. Plus it's got that great name, "flash memory" - who wouldn't want that in their datacenter ( (myths about flash being less reliable than traditional disks debunked <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/not_a_flash_in_the">here</a>). <P> Sun recently introduced a storage device heavily optimized with flash memory. It's known by a similarly scintillating name, the <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/">Sun Storage 7000</A>, and is what we call an "open storage" device - one built with commodity flash and disk components, alongside open source software (<A HREF="http://mags.acm.org/communications/200807/?pg=49">this is an excellent summary</A>). <P> <a href="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 110px;" src="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/images/zot_abr_box1.gif" /> </a> The 7000 has one remarkably interesting attribute: it learns. The longer it's doing its job, interacting with applications and serving data, the faster it becomes. How it accomplishes this relates to the bookstores I first discussed. <P>Most storage devices behave like the unsuccessful bookstore, organizing books with a sorting algorithm to which the user ascribes no value - disks make no attempt to position data based on the frequency of access, and as a result, popular content is delivered with the same, or poorer latency as unpopular content. Storage architects go to great lengths to provide band-aids to the problem, but most fail in their attempt and fall back on massive over provisioning. That is, they throw money at the problem by "short stroking" data - making sure all data is written to the outer sectors on a disk platter, the parts that spin fastest, delivering highest performance reading/writing. This can work, but it's exceptionally inefficient - and wastes money, power, space, disks and patience.<P>Conversely, the 7000 behaves like the commercially oriented bookstore, and uses algorithms (instead of storage admins) to adaptively place the most frequently accessed data where it will be fastest to retrieve: flash memory. (I was talking to a software analyst today who wanted to know why we bothered with the hardware business when so much value was in our software assets - this is a perfect example, the value isn't in the software or the hardware, it's in the systems we build with both.)<P><p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 80px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> The internal operating system (OpenSolaris, paired with ZFS) actually "warms up" the device after it starts working - it watches traffic, notices which files are being most frequently accessed, and caches them in flash. Thereafter, they're available near instantaneously. The 7000 can then use far slower, and less power consumptive disks for the infrequently accessed data. Net result? Hot files are served up orders of magnitude faster than even short stroked, jet fueled premium enterprise disks (did I mention those disks cost an outrageous fortune?) - and customers spend radically less on the device, on power, cooling, space, etc. <P> From your end user's perspective, the front page of your news site, your most frequently accessed products or content, or the <A HREF="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Captain-CB-Sully-Sullenberger/45557497235">Facebook profile of the pilot</A> who just saved the lives of 185 passengers landing an <A HREF="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090115/ap_on_re_us/plane_in_river">airplane on a river</A>, are served up with lightning speed. Your users are happier, your CFO is happier, your family, with whom you're spending more time, is happier. (And if there were ever a machine optimized for MySQL, this would be it - but it also runs brilliantly with Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server - and Postgres, of course).<P>It's common sense: if you put the bestsellers on the first shelf a visitor sees when they walk in the door, they're more likely to buy one than if you put them in alphabetical order around the store. As the bestsellers change, so do your promotions and displays - if you adapt to demand, you capture more of it. That's the basic premise behind the 7000, to use systems innovation to drive performance, eliminate latency and radically cut purchase and operating cost.<P>That behavior might make a bookstore less beloved in my neighborhood, but it makes Sun more beloved in the datacenter. And it makes the 7000 a great candidate to be one of the storage industry's best sellers.<P>If you're a reseller or customer, and would like to try out a 7000 free of charge, just <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/products.jsp#Storage">click here</A>... <P>There's also a great simulator available for <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/resources.jsp">free download here</A> - so admins can check out the user interface and diagnostic capabilities of the 7000 without installing a machine.<P>And speaking of best sellers, here's a video in which the 7000 plays a starring role - showing you how <b>not</b> to coax the best performance out of your storage devices.<P> <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/tDacjrSCeq4&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/tDacjrSCeq4&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/open_storage_wins_at_wikipedia</id> <title type="html">(Another) Win for Open Storage...</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/open_storage_wins_at_wikipedia"/> <published>2008-11-26T06:20:27-08:00</published> <updated>2008-11-26T06:24:48-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="openstorage" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="solaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="wikimedia" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="wikipedia" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><P>Wikipedia is one of the world's most visited web sites (8th in the <A HREF="http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none">top 10</A>, in fact), delivering an enormous breadth of content to an audience as vast as the internet. <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 110px;" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/2/2a/Nohat-logo-nowords-bgwhite-200px.jpg" /> </a> But Wikipedia's evolved to become more than an on-line encyclopedia: they've become one of the world's largest search engines, they're a global source of real-time news, alongisde educational, political and health related content - and one of the world's most valuable brands and media properties.<P>Wikipedia's also a great example of a "<A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/Gregp/entry/a_word_or_two_on">redshift</A>" application: a segment of the market that's growing faster than the technology industry's capacity to innovate. Technology companies have to pay special attention to such <em>redshifted</em> segments - not only do they eventually grow the overall market, but their innovation often drives the technology landscape. Broadly speaking, social media, from free news and social networking, to search and content sharing, is doing exactly that - defining new architectures and requirements for radical scale, economics and availability.<P>So I was really pleased that <A HREF="http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/081120/20081120005365.html?.v=1">Wikimedia had chosen Sun's Open Storage platforms</a> over proprietary alternatives, to help manage their evolution to rich media - bringing high quality video and time based content to their more than 250,000,000 users globally. That's a big audience waiting to upload - and interact with - high quality content.<P><p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 80px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> </p> Like Wikipedia, most of the planet's largest web sites (just look at the top 100) are built atop Sun's MySQL database. Which is why we've just introduced a line of systems platform designed specifically to run MySQL - at up to 3x the performance of whitebox alternatives (after all, it's far easier marketing to audiences that have already chosen Sun). We're now expanding those offerings with our newest <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/storagetek/index.jsp">Open Storage</A> portfolio, as well - built to run ZFS from 5 to <b>50x</b> traditional performance. And again, all such systems are available <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/systems/solutions/mysql/performance.jsp">here for free trial</a> - pick the system you want to try, we'll cover shipping costs to and from your site.<P>And while I'm on the topic of systems... I've been asked for insights into our recent software reorganization, in which we announced three main focus groups (a Systems group, an Applications group, and a Cloud group). Why'd we make that change?<P><p> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_World_Financial_Center"> <img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 340px;" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c8/SWFC_July_2007.jpg/212px-SWFC_July_2007.jpg" /> </a> </A> First, look no further than this win for one of my main motivations: I'd like to enhance the value and alignment we offer to customers that want to run our system software (like MySQL and ZFS) at very high scale - and require, from Sun and our OEM partners, the tightest possible technical collaboration and alignment between hardware and software.<P>Second, this move amplifies the obvious (at least to us): the storage market will be larger than the server market, but you may not be able to tell - they're converging, built from the same systems software and hardware components (networking will follow the same path, more on that in the future). <P>Finally, adoption and software distribution/marketing is different than revenue generation. And with the <A HREF="http://sysnet.sunwarp.net/maps/?lat=26.745610382199022&lng=-10.8984375&zoom=2&mtype=Blank">adoption of ZFS</A> well underway, technical and business alignment have become our dominant priorities. It's at the heart of what's fueling one of Sun's fastest growing businesses (ZFS based Open Storage was up <em>more than 150%</em> last quarter, growing far faster than our proprietary peers). <P> </p> How large is the redshift opportunity? It's not just businesses like Wikipedia that are defining new scale requirements for the industry. It's the on-line bank I saw last week, now serving more than 100m accounts globally - contemplating the addition of video chat for customer service. It's the government customer I just visited trying to deliver driver's license and passport renewal services to hundreds of millions of its citizens. The term redshift describes applications, <em>not</em> customers (remember, even Wikipedia has payroll - not exactly a redshift application).<P>In an openly networked world, redshift applications begin to equate to social phenomena - and social phenomena don't respect your IT budget. Which is to say, neither a 10 person startup, nor a 10,000 person retailer want to go broke buying software licenses and storage, just because they've struck a chord with the planet. Which is increasingly why both sides of the industry are moving to open source. <P>And open storage.<P>________________<P><font size = "1">(And with apologies to the OpenOffice community - we are not going to be inserting ads into OpenOffice.org - we're creating partnerships to brand and promote StarOffice, and the cloud we're developing behind it.)</font><P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/the_value_of_distribution_java</id> <title type="html">The Inside Story (Java, Microsoft and MySQL)</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/the_value_of_distribution_java"/> <published>2008-11-12T23:19:56-08:00</published> <updated>2008-11-13T08:27:13-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="distribution" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="microsoft" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="retail" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:msft" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">As consumer spending slows across the world, a variety of "brick and mortar" retailers are clearly feeling the impact. Foot traffic is slowing, and it's getting harder to balance debt laden real estate portfolios and fickle consumer trends. <P> <a href="http://www.zappos.com"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 110px;" src="http://z.about.com/d/shoes/1/0/u/K/converse_sneakers.jpg" /> </a> <P> For consumer product manufacturers, retail distribution is key - it's how you get in front of a customer. It's why the big PC manufacturers are all working hard to score deals with big retailers (or build their own retail outlets) around the world. <P> But making money on PC's is tough - for most PC makers, you're remarketing someone else's operating system and someone else's microprocessor - it's not for the faint of heart (or faint of balance sheet). For Sun, our retail distribution concerns don't surround consumer hardware (we don't make PC's) as much as consumer <em>software</em> - the popularity of which defines our market opportunity. Said simply, if you're running Java or another open source platform, Sun can build differentiated datacenters in the clouds behind those devices. If not, it's a lot tougher (not impossible, just a lot tougher). <object width="213" height="172"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/8To-6VIJZRE&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8To-6VIJZRE&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="213" height="172" align=right style="margin: 10px 0px 20px 10px"></embed></object><P>Consumer software, though, is defined by a virtuous cycle. Developers target popular software (like Firefox, Flash or Java). In so doing, they create applications and content that consumers use. What consumers use, they tend to use in volume (the internet's a very big place, after all). Developers notice those volumes, and target the platforms that reach the most consumers. And that defines Sun's market opportunity (someone smart once jumped up and down on stage yelling "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Amen.)<p>The Java runtime remains one of the world's most popular platforms used by developers - and thus, one of the world's most popular consumer software products. <a href="http://www.java.com"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 100px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Unknown.jpeg" /> </a> For the cynics about to chime in with "but I don't use it," the odds are good you do - it's become an invisible, but critical part of an enormous breadth of consumer and business services (from video uploaders on social networks, to stock market analytical tools). And as that content becomes more popular, so does the Java platform - expanding Sun's market opportunity in the corresponding datacenters. That's why we see it as a virtuous cycle.<P>That cycle also provides Sun with some exceptional foot traffic - just last month, we distributed more than 60,000,000 Java runtimes, to users all across the planet. The number is growing, as more content is built for Java 6 and the upcoming <A HREF="http://java.sun.com/javafx/">JavaFX</A>, as more PC's join the network, and as more workers join the workforce (and are assigned Java-enabled laptops). At this point, I'd bet there are about 1,000,000,000 (that's a billion) Java runtimes installed on PC's around the world. With more by the day - each generating revenue for Sun. <P>As with most of our software products, we don't distribute products without intent - like Google, our products are both a means of acquiring customers, and generating revenue. Freely distributed software establishes a relationship with an end user - just like free search, free news or free shopping. About two years ago, we reached an agreement with Google in which they recognized the value of our relationships with Java consumers. Just as the PC makers want distribution via retail outlets, Google wanted distribution of their search technologies - via our Java update mechanism. When we present an update to a user, we may offer other sponsored software (a Google search toolbar, eg). <P> <a href="http://www.ebay.com"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 110px;" src="http://cocktailnerd.com/wp-content/uploads/gavel_auction.gif" /> </a> After a careful negotiation, we agreed, and crafted a wonderful relationship that served consumers, Google, and Sun. Last year, we renewed the agreement, and recognized even more value for all involved. This year, we decided to run an open auction, and received bids from a number of companies. It was a tough process, but given the growing volume and momentum around Java, we clearly represented just about the most popular distribution vehicle on the internet today - and Microsoft worked hard to represent the most attractive total offer.<P> <A HREF="http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 15px 10px 0px; cursor:pointer; width: 80px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/MySQL_Logo.jpg"></A></A> The decision to go with Microsoft was based on overall value - it was also predicated upon their endorsement of and agreement to help promote MySQL. Stay tuned for more details on what we'll be doing together.<P>What's the deal worth to Sun? This deal will be one of the most valuable distribution deals ever struck in the industry - and it likely makes Microsoft one of Sun's largest customers. It'll also set the stage for an even more interesting auction next year, as more and more folks realize the value of retail distribution. Thus far, our deal with Microsoft is US only - and new auctions are in flight for international rights (alongside other non-toolbar products for the US, perhaps a browser...).<P>As for other high value distribution assets at Sun? I just read one analyst report questioning whether anyone actually used OpenOffice. We happen to run Sun Microsystems on OpenOffice - more importantly, it's used across the world, and we're now commercially licensing it to brand name companies wanting to save big dollars on office productivity. <P> <A HREF="http://www.openoffice.org"><IMG style="float:right; margin:10px 0px 10px 10px; cursor:pointer; width: 180px;"SRC="http://marketing.openoffice.org/art/galleries/marketing/web_buttons/nicu/180x60_1_free.png"></A></A> To put some data around its popularity, last week, we distributed more than <b>3,000,000</b> copies of OpenOffice 3. Downloads are accelerating, giving us a reachable user base we estimate to be between 150,000,000 and 200,000,000 users - a global recession will amplify OpenOffice adoption. And 100's of millions of users drive a lot of foot traffic. An auction's afoot (no pun intended) to see who we'll be partnering with us to integrate their businesses and brands into our binary product distribution - the possibilities are limitless: people tend to print those documents, fax them, copy them, project them <font size="1">(and I know this annoys my friends in the free software community, but branding allows us to invest more in OO.o community and features, from which everyone benefits)</font>.<P><A HREF="http://www.verizon.com"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0px; cursor:pointer; width: 40px;"SRC="http://www.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/techchron/2008/10/08/BB_Storm_Front_Left271x500.jpg"></A></A> With Verizon running a <A HREF="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/verizon-microsoft-near-web-search-deal/story.aspx?guid={42E3D81E-3E33-44D9-BBE6-56157EC0850A}">similar auction</A> to integrate a search vendor into their wireless devices, they (and their industry across the world) are seeing the same opportunity. Just because a few retailers are having trouble doesn't mean the value of reaching customers has gone away. Foot traffic still counts, but in today's economy, software distribution's a lot easier to manage and monetize than a real estate portfolio. <P>After all, who wouldn't want to meet a few hundred million new customers?<P><P>________________<P><b>Update:</b> I should've clarified, above: users without any interest in toolbars can simply decline the offer during install - and receive their Java update without any sponsored software.<P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/you_have_to_stop_to</id> <title type="html">You Have to Stop to Change Direction</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/you_have_to_stop_to"/> <published>2008-11-10T08:40:00-08:00</published> <updated>2008-11-10T08:45:03-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="7000" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="fishworks" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="infrastructure" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="open" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="openstorage" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="storage" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sun" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:emc" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:ntap" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><P>The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry.<P>Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/2464554/Beluga-whales-blowing-bubble-rings.html"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 110px;" src="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00782/beluga-whale-bubble_782214i.jpg" /> </a> The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality.<P>But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.<P>Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/LineItems.pdf">this report</A> for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a <A HREF="http://www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp">consumer product</A> or two). Like Google and Microsoft, our products are both our ads and our revenue streams - our brands, and products, are recognized globally. <p> <a href="http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1683878780?bclid=1683701916&bctid=1900390530"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 140px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/MySQLSystems.jpg" /> </a> </p> On Monday last week, you saw us continue to convert that brand awareness to revenue - with the introduction of a full line of <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/systems/solutions/mysql/solutions.jsp">MySQL optimized systems</A>. By our estimates, there are about 11,000,000 MySQL users on earth - our new systems can <em>triple</em> their application performance. So we've made free evaluation units available to MySQL users (via our <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/systems/solutions/mysql/performance.jsp">Try and Buy</A> programs)</b>. Click the image to the right to listen to Marten Mickos and John Fowler talk about the opportunities ahead.<P>And that brings me to today. I was on a call last week with the Global CIO for one of our largest customers - one who was dramatically affected by the credit crisis. I was outlining where we were headed in open storage (a business that grew more than 150% for Sun last quarter), and he said, "One of your peers just told me flash was overhyped." I asked him if the peer happened to work for a proprietary storage company. He protected his source, but I knew the answer (I probably knew the CEO, too).<p>The storage industry bears a remarkable resemblance to the proprietary server industry at the bursting of the <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 120px;" src="http://www.bctree.com/images/photos/summer-plum.jpg" /> </a> internet bubble - closed, highly profitable, frustrating customers with exorbitant charges. Plump, and ripe for change. Like a plum. Flash memory and open source file systems are about to change the landscape, and upend the industry - you read it here, first. <P>A <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm">notable philosopher</A> once said, "You have to stop to change direction" - and for better or worse, I know a lot of customers stopping right now. They're rethinking their future, and it's into that thought process we're introducing our newest open storage platforms, engineered with flash memory and open software to radically scale back what customers have to spend - while radically increasing performance, capability and ease of use. <p><a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 40px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Fish.gif" /> </a> Amplifying our Thumper product line, what started as the FISHWorks Project (<u>F</u>ully <u>I</u>ntegrated <u>S</u>oftware and <u>H</u>ardware) in Sun's Labs, is now being unveiled - in the <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/index.jsp">Sun Storage 7000</a> line of unified storage products.<p>Now, storing data on a disk is fairly straightforward. But administering large pools of fully replicated data, diagnosing problems on production systems, seamlessly dealing with capacity planning and disk failures, spanning every protocol known to man - all without draining your budget with antediluvian license keys and proprietary hardware - those are very high value problems to solve.<p>And those are exactly the problems we've solved.<P> <a href="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/images/g20_abr_feature1_zoom.jpg"><img style="margin: 5px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 100px;" src="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/images/g20_abr_feature1_zoom.jpg" /> </a> The 7000 class systems take about five minutes to set up and provision (yes, five), and we've eliminated almost all the complexity around volume administration and drive failure (remember, <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs_learning_center.jsp">ZFS technology</A> is at the core). The 7000 systems are driven by the most scalable, powerful, open storage microcode in the industry: the OpenSolaris kernel. DTrace analytics provide a real-time lens into <em>production systems</em> - to understand performance, workloads, and help make live capacity-planning decisions (click picture at left for a sample control panel). The systems come bundled with a full suite of protocol, data management and availability features - built into the system without incremental fees or license keys. <P> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 80px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> </p> For the geeks among you, we've turbocharged ZFS with <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/x64/intel/zfs_solution_brief.pdf">Hybrid Storage Pools</A>. Hybrid storage pools allow ZFS to optimize storage performance by spreading data out across DRAM, read or write optimized flash memory (they're not the same thing, after all), and very lower power commodity disks. The net result is a massive speedup in storage performance, with an equivalently massive drop in power consumption, all managed transparently - applications will just run faster. Much, much faster. For a full set of technical videos/specs, <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/tips.jsp">go here</A>.<P>Storage customers and administrators are about to experience a radical improvement to their quality of life - all without pharmaceutical intervention. And as the price of flash memory continues to plummet, it's only going to get better.<p>But you have to stop to change direction.<P>____________________________________________________<P><font size="1">Try out a 7000 free of charge - just go to our <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/7110/">Try and Buy</A> page, select a configuration, and give one a whirl. <P>And as we did to kick start awareness of our Niagara systems, for those capable or interested, write a blog or publish a review (use the tag "fishworks") - we'll select (at our sole discretion) from those we see, and give a few 7000's away to those with the most valuable/constructive comments. All reviews are eligible (good and bad).<P>A little bit of history <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/fishworks_now_it_can_be">here</A>, too. <P></font> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/change_has_come_to_america</id> <title type="html">Change Has Come to America</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/change_has_come_to_america"/> <published>2008-11-04T23:00:00-08:00</published> <updated>2008-11-04T23:02:43-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="and" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="barack" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="barackobama.com" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="elect" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="free" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="house" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="obama" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="open" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="president" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="software" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="source" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="white" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><a> <A HREF="http://www.barackobama.com/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 110px;" src="http://skaroff.com/blog/img/ObamaLogo.jpg" /></a> </a></p> On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.<P>I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, <A HREF="http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/techinterest">BarackObama.com</A>. <P>Lest many of you get your hopes up, we cannot guarantee the White House to all MySQL users.<P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/understanding_sun_s_business_q1</id> <title type="html">Understanding Sun's Business - Q1 Results</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/understanding_sun_s_business_q1"/> <published>2008-10-30T14:00:00-07:00</published> <updated>2009-02-06T18:50:53-08:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="niagara" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="q1fy2009" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="t5440" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">We announced our earnings today, and put specifics around our preannouncement from a week ago. <P><P><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; width: 100px;"SRC="http://www.netbanker.com/Images/glass6.jpg"><P> We also greatly increased the transparency of Sun's business by providing line item detail surrounding our most important product categories (and we broke out core elements of our Software business for the first time). If you'd like to listen to our earnings call, just <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/earnings_releases/audiocast.html">click here</A> - in addition, here's a quick synopsis of the quarter and our business overall.<P>At a corporate level in Q1, Sun's revenue was down 7% year over year. Growth in our emerging products was more than offset by declines in our traditional, high end products. We were surprised by the magnitude of the decline, which reflected a dramatic slowing in the US and Europe, and the effects the credit crisis is having on our customers - across nearly all geographies and industries, but clearly concentrated among financial services companies.<P>Unlike our peers, Sun is more exposed to high end systems - so declines in this business have an immediate impact, even if our newer, emerging businesses demonstrate fantastic growth (which many did). For example, the Tape market won't sustain 30% year over year growth for any participant - but our ZFS based OpenStorage products are growing at more than 100%. The latter are smaller, emerging businesses, driven by open source and new innovations - and will take time to eclipse more traditional businesses in our P&L.<P>To drive an even greater level of transparency for investors and analysts, we've added a new management report to our quarterly updates - for the first time, this will give line item detail of our performance, and a sense for how we're making some of the most important decisions at the core of our long term strategy. You can find that break out, <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/earnings_releases/call_slides.jsp">here</A>.<P>Here are a few of the major questions I'm receiving:<P><b>What went well within the quarter?</b><P>The biggest highlights were the performance of our Solaris based, chip multi-threading (CMT) systems, which again grew a whopping 80%, year over year. These systems leverage awareness of Solaris/Opensolaris and our outstanding ISV portfolio, and are driven by extreme energy efficiency and virtualization - attributes we just multiplied with the launch of our newest CMT system: the <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5440/">T5440</A>.<P>Simultaneously, our Open Storage systems also delivered a great quarter, up 150+% year over year. These systems, known by many as Thumpers, are amplified by the awareness of our open source ZFS file system, a technology at the heart of Sun's storage business. You'll be hearing more about Open Storage at a launch event we're holding on November 10th. If you're technical, and you want some hints about what we're about to unveil, <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/storage/entry/flash_performance_in_storage_systems">click here</A>. <P>And finally, most of our software business grew - including MySQL, Java, <del>alongside Solaris, management and our virtualization products</del>. As we've been saying, open source is a great distribution model - and it feeds a great revenue model.<P><b>What about lowlights?</b><P>Clearly the traditional businesses slowed significantly - with enterprise systems (our largest, mainframe class systems) declining year over year. This time last year, those same systems grew nearly 20% - so the downturn is having an impact. It's crucial to understand these systems are far less sensitive to open source innovations or Solaris adoption - they're sold to customers who are scaling up existing Solaris applications, who rely on quality, fault tolerance and our capacity to deliver mainframe scale. We and Fujitsu just expanded this product line - and no matter the downturn, we remain exceptionally focused and committed to traditional enterprise computing. The expansion of scale out computing doesn't negate scale up computing - if anything, it leads to even greater demand, over time. IBM was right, mainframes will always be sexy (especially when they run Solaris :). <P>On the storage front, tape declined slightly, although our high end storage systems grew, yielding growth overall in storage - growth we're driving to accelerate with the introduction of our upcoming Open Storage innovations.<P><b>Why were gross margins lower this quarter?</b><P>A few reasons that Mike Lehman, our CFO, elaborated on during the call - the lull in very high end systems, along with discounting and component pricing depressed gross margins. In addition, we went through a series of product transition related expenses this quarter we do not expect to recur, that depressed margins by around 2 percentage points.<P><b>Now, how is Software growing if you give everything away?</b><P>We make our software freely available to enable its distribution to the farthest reaches of the market - which we then monetize with commercial subscriptions and services, alongside optimized hardware systems (like Open Storage, above). We continue to reach customers that have already settled on our software - the process of selling to them is simplified by the fact they're already using our core products. And unlike most university students (who typically have more time than money), our paying customers view downtime or administrative complexity as more expensive than a software subscription (that is, they have more money than time). <P>Thus, customers will pay, and continue to pay for access to enterprise grade features, along with mission critical support and maintenance - the Software business is both a license, subscription and services business. <P>To understand the total size and value of Software at Sun, you need to look at billings alongside our multi billion dollar support streams - remembering that a lot of our software is sold as a subscription service (remember, it's open source). In addition, you have to recognize that how much a "Systems Service" support contract is attributable to software is entirely subjective (we don't price them separately to customers). It's like asking how much revenue a mobile phone manufacturer should attribute to their operating system - you're not charged separately at the point of sale.<P><b>Wait, you make money off Java?</b><P>Yes, it's among the most profitable technology products at Sun - and improving. Java's one of the most popularly distributed pieces of Software on the internet, we distribute over a million Java runtimes a day to users across every OS and geography on PC's. That helps us reach a very broad community of users and, more importantly, developers. We have some exciting news coming up around these distribution volumes - and their value to us, and others.<P><b>What is Sun focusing on?</b><P>Strategically, we continue to focus on two core areas - creating the world's largest, and fastest growing developer communities - for whom we build the products, services and technologies on which they'll build their products and services. With brands like MySQL, Java and OpenSolaris - we measure and drive their adoption very aggressively.<P>And secondly, we deliver compelling commercial offers to those deploying applications - across a diversity of industries - through commercial subscription, services and optimized system products. That is, we sell datacenter systems, software and services.<P>We're focused on today's customers with our current products and services, and tomorrow's customers with our investments in freely distributed software.<P>Operationally, we're focused on execution - in the field, in the labs, and on behalf of our shareholders. Innovation loves a crisis, even when the stock markets don't - and Sun's positioned very well to supply the platforms on which the next generation of clouds will be built.<P><b>What are you hearing from customers?</b><P>It really depends upon industry and geography. From Wall St. I've heard, "I can't take your call until I crawl out from under my desk," (only a slight exaggeration) - at the other extreme, an executive at a professional social networking company said, "we're being crushed with new accounts."<P>But there are three basic themes I'm hearing.<P>The first is a profound concern surrounding the global economy. If the headlines are bad, you hold off consumer spending - if you hold off on consumer spending, the headlines are likely to worsen. It's tough to break that cycle.<P>The second is a reaffirmation of the importance of technology - for discovering drugs, running businesses, modeling supply chains and automating business processes, technology's not getting less important, it's getting more important. Even if budgets are tight in the near term.<P>The third is the need for change - one executive to whom I spoke recently said her entire discretionary budget was consumed by one proprietary vendor's price increase. So she's out looking for an alternative, and MySQL fits the bill. Which is to say, necessity's the mother of invention - and there's a lot of necessity going around right now.<P>_____________________<P>All in all, it was a tough quarter for Sun and our customers - but we're emboldened by the progress we made in our emerging markets and technology areas, investments we plan on amplifying and accelerating. Investments whose adoption will be hastened by customers facing new choices.<P>Stay tuned for our newest storage announcements on November 10th... just as the popping of the internet bubble let loose a flood of innovation for the server world, the global credit crisis is about to shake up the storage industry, too.<P> ______________________ <P><em>Safe Harbor Statement</em><P><font size="1">Jonathan's blog contains forward-looking statements regarding the future results and performance of Sun including statements with respect to our commitment to enterprise computing, the demand for scale up computing, the continued business of our paying customers, upcoming news regarding Java distribution volumes and value, expectations for the OpenOffice community, our strategy and related progress, our positioning with respect to the next generation of clouds and our expectations with respect to investments in emerging markets and technology areas. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in such forward-looking statements include: competition; pricing pressures; the complexity of Sun's products and the importance of rapidly and successfully developing and introducing new products; Sun's dependence on significant customers, specific industries and geographies; delays in product development or customer acceptance and implementation of new products and technologies; Sun's ability to implement a new enterprise resource planning system; a material acquisition, restructuring or other event that results in significant charges; failure to successfully integrate acquired companies; reliance on single-source suppliers; risks associated with Sun's ability to purchase a sufficient amount of components to meet demand; inventory risks; risks associated with the quality of Sun's products; risks associated with international customers and operations; Sun's dependence on channel partners; failure to retain key employees; and risks associated with Sun's ability to achieve expected cost reductions within expected time frames. Please also refer to Sun's periodic reports that are filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008. Sun assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements. </font><P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/innovation_loves_a_crisis</id> <title type="html">Innovation Loves a Crisis</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/innovation_loves_a_crisis"/> <published>2008-10-02T15:42:00-07:00</published> <updated>2008-10-03T15:19:21-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="linux" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sunray" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:ntap" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:orcl" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><a> <A HREF="http://flickr.com/photos/musely/2036405625/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2081/2036405625_4f9fb0a3b2.jpg?v=0" /></a> </a></p> <P><br><br><br> I thought I'd share a note I sent earlier in the week to Sun's leaders - about the turmoil we're seeing in the markets, and how I want our team focusing their efforts. <P>_______________________________________________________________________________<P><b>Begin forwarded message:</b><br><b>From</b>: Jonathan Schwartz <br><b>Date</b>: September 30, 2008 12:02:29 AM PDT<br><b>To</b>: All Sun<br><b>Subject</b>: Headlines, Financial Crisis, etc.<br><P>You can't have missed today's headlines - the American Congress failed to pass a critical bill authorizing the Treasury to put a floor under the US banking sector. The market swooned, and politicians in the US, and across the world, are bickering over the right long term answer - jump in and take action to save the troubled institutions, or step aside and let the market sort it out. Several more banks/insurers were shuttered or bailed out today - I'm confident we haven't seen the last of these collapses and rescues.<P>And I know there are questions about "how does this affect Sun?" Well, I believe almost all our core customers will be affected - not just the banks, but the telcos, hospitals, media companies, construction firms, airlines, governments, startups, you name it. Every customer that depends upon credit as a means of financing their business - whether it's a university or a Fortune 100 transportation company - is going to be under severe stress.<P>It's also going to create a huge opportunity - if we're on offense. Not on defense, not worried about the impact on Sun, but driving the outcomes for Sun's customers and shareholders.<P>And here are a few important things to remember.<P><b>1. Our customers look to technology as a means of driving value and productivity.</b><P>You're not going to hear from any of our customers, "let's stop buying technology and hire more people to do the work." They're going to default to the opposite - automating work, and finding answers and opportunities with technology, not headcount. And in that process lies an opportunity for Sun - to engage with customers in driving down cost, driving up utilization, and driving the changes that yield immediate and long term benefit. The right question for every customer you meet is - "how can I help?" I assure you, they'll have ideas for us. And we have no shortage of ideas for them. Personally, I'm reaching out to customers and partners just to check in and offer help - I'd recommend you do the same.<P><b>2. That said, we are aggressively expanding our customer base.</b><P>Our concentration in financial services and telecommunications is exactly why we're working so hard to expand our customer base. We're dramatically underpenetrated in the global market - and that represents a great opportunity. I need every executive to think seriously, esp. in the market-facing portions of the organization, about growing our current relationships and growing new customers. The 'and' is important - growth matters in both contexts.<P>And why do I think we have permission to grow new customers?<P><b>3. Because innovation loves a crisis.</b><P>Remember the bursting of the internet bubble? The initial wave of open source adoption followed that collapse some six or seven years ago. That same zeal for breakthrough, game changing economics is back with a vengeance - and this time, Sun's positioned as the single biggest potential beneficiary. Want proof? As companies move to lower the cost of proprietary database vendors, their number one choice is: MySQL. The number one choice to lower spending on proprietary storage: ZFS with OpenStorage. How will the proprietary alternatives fare against xVM? Glassfish? Lustre? OpenSolaris? Same, from where I sit. There's opportunity everywhere I look.<P>We can, and should, be on offense across the board. From our newest Batoka and M-Series SPARC systems, to our newest Constellation Intel and AMD blades, from our network identity offerings (talk about automating labor-intensive processes!) to leveraging our amazing SunRay thin clients, or our PS and Support Services capabilities - we have the most powerful offers we've had in years. Imagine if our portfolio had been this strong when the dot com bubble burst - we'd have swept the floor, and been in a dramatically different spot.<P>Which is all to say, there will be no end of opinions surrounding what the US, or the EU, or the Asian governments should be doing to bolster economic performance. I'm not that interested in the public debate - I am infinitely more interested in the private debate - going on inside every one of our customers surrounding "which OS will we pick?" "What's my open source strategy?" "How can I radically reduce spending on proprietary storage?" "How can I save on power and space?" Which vendor understands my problems?" "Which vendors are asking if they can help - which are truly my partners?"<P><a> <A HREF=""><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 160px;" src="http://api.ning.com/files/40QnsbLyxlMwSDu82ehNf6dErXO*XNr23zWej*zQLORqnocbmSPqIH0SWhVWDZ3iTQ77il0Y45JDFwhUV5DiyI0eYd7RC0-k/open_door.jpg" /></a> </a></p> In times of crisis, we have a big opportunity to stand apart from our peers, to be better connected to the market, even if it's in turmoil. Yes, our customers are going to be under stress, but that's simply another way of saying "open to change." And I want Sun to be the company engaging them in the transition - with our ideas and our roadmaps. The door is open.<P>And yes, we will see some customers disappear - we will also see many emerge even stronger. And the market, as it's done for the past 30 years, will return to growth - led by the companies that took advantage of the downturn to become even more valuable, to grow even faster.<P>So I want to assure you, we are watching the market very carefully, to understand the impact on Sun, and the challenges in front of us - on a macro and micro level. But I and my leadership team know the drill, we've seen this before when the last bubble burst - *now is the time* to get in front of the opportunity, and firmly establish new ground. Now's the time our customers will be most open to change.<P>Let's be sure we're there to help - and to take advantage of the opportunity.<P>Jonathan<P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/openstorage_and_really_big_data</id> <title type="html">Saving a Fortune in Data Warehousing</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/openstorage_and_really_big_data"/> <published>2008-09-24T23:59:00-07:00</published> <updated>2008-09-27T20:42:46-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="greenplum" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="openstorage" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="oracle" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="postgres" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sayonara" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><B>UPDATE at bottom.</B><P><a> <A HREF="http://www.greenplum.com/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 160px;" src="http://www.greenplum.com/images/greenplum_logo.gif" /></a> </a></p> I just wanted to extend my congratulations to the team at Greenplum, and our joint customers at Fox Interactive Media - the folks behind MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, FOXSports.com, and a whole series of web properties that together represent one of the single largest audiences on the web. <P><a> <A HREF="http://www.myspace.com/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 160px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/myspace.jpg" /></a> </a></p> All three of us <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-09/sunflash.20080924.2.xml">announced</A> today that Fox is running a massive production data warehouse built atop Greenplum's data warehousing software on Sun's Solaris/ZFS based OpenStorage platforms (a sea of Thumpers, to be specific). That is to say, open source software is at the core of one of the world's largest - and most affordable - data warehouses.<P><a> <A HREF="http://www.nyse.com/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 80px;" src="http://www.nyse.com/images/about/nyx_logo-realtime.gif" /></a> </a></p> Fox joins a series of joint Sun/Greenplum customers, from LinkedIn to the New York Stock Exchange, in looking to open source databases and innovation as a vehicle to drive better insight, faster decisions and more efficiency.<P> <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 80px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> </p> Which is to say, customers that are tired of proprietary vendors with a knack for raising license fees during economic downturns have a clear set of remarkably affordable alternatives. Based on commodity economics everyone can understand.<P>Congratulations to all involved!<P>______________________________<P><B>UPDATE</B>: I've gotten a fair number of inquiries from folks wanting to know how the Greenplum/Thumper data warehouse discussed above prices out against its competitors - given that one recently announced proprietary entrant has suggested $15,000 per terabyte is acceptable to customers. My view is that's a pre-bubble price, and roughly an order of magnitude too expensive in today's market - and unlikely to garner more than headlines. But that's obviously a biased view, I'd check with a few customers to find out what they want to pay.<P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/xvm1</id> <title type="html">Of Wine, Virtualization and xVM</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/xvm1"/> <published>2008-09-14T22:34:00-07:00</published> <updated>2008-09-15T06:46:52-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="opscenter" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="solaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sunray" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:intc" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:msft" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:vmw" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="virtualbox" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="xvm" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">A few years back, I remember sitting with a group of customers talking about wine, and virtualization (a natural pairing, if ever one existed). Wine, because we were at an event Sun was hosting in Napa Valley, the heart of California's wine country - virtualization, because the attendees were data center professionals who'd come to talk about the future. <a> <A HREF="http://www.turleywinecellars.com/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 80px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Wine.jpg" /></a> </a></p> <P>The customers in attendance all ran very high scale, high value data centers, who would deservedly respond to the accusation that they "hugged" their servers with "and what of it?" They were the individuals who kept some of the world's most valuable systems running with exceptional reliability.<P>But they were all starting to see and worry about the same thing, running applications in "virtualized" grids of networked infrastructure ("cloud computing" wasn't yet in vogue, or I'm sure someone would've used the term).<P> <a> <img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Barrels.jpg" /></a> </p> Now, virtualization is a simple concept with a fancy name (abbreviated to "v12n" by the cognoscenti - by that method, I am "j14z"). It's simply slicing up physical computers into many smaller "virtual" computers, each of which can be outfitted with its own OS and application stack. <P>That is, not only does a virtualized computer take on the task of running multiple OS's (running atop a hypervisor, described below), but the OS's themselves might change over time, responding to load or schedule. The traditional view of "computer A runs OS/Application B" can now give way to a more responsive "these computers are available for high priority work," without regard to operating system or architecture. A spike in on-line shopping might reallocate more "virtual" machines to transaction processing during peak shopping hours, shifting to a different OS/app stack when the frenzy dies down. Capacity moves from fixed to fungible.<P>Although desktop virtualization wasn't the focus of these customers, most live in a world with multiple desktop OS's, too - it's not that they all (like me) run five different desktop OS's, most don't - it's that they have multiple generations of Windows, or no longer have the source code to legacy applications, a condition that dictates you keep old OS's (and hardware) around. Desktop virtualization enables users to run multiple OS's side by side on a single desktop, and divorces software upgrades from hardware upgrades (an innovation keeping CIO's and developers smiling).<P>Back to the datacenter, virtualization can enable extreme infrastructure consolidation - decoupling applications from hardware drives more efficient capacity planning and system purchases. And as exciting as that was to everyone, if things went wrong, you could also tank the quarter, blow those savings and end your career. So, why all the anxiety?<P>If I could sum it up, these customers worried that virtualization would dissolve the control they'd carefully built to manage extreme reliability. In essence, they could hug a virtualized mainframe or an E25K (hugging is the act of paying exquisite attention to an individual machine), but it's far harder to hug a cloud. Nor can you ask a cloud why it's slow, irritable, or flaky, questions more easily answered with a single, big machine.<P>As the wine soothed their anxieties, a few of them began to draw out their vision of an ideal cloud environment (our laptops were open to take notes). Summarized, here's what they wanted:<P> <a> <img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 120px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Stethoscope.jpg" /></a> </p> <b>Extreme diagnosability</b>. Datacenter veterans know that things rarely run as planned, so assuming from the outset you're looking for problems, bottlenecks or optimization opportunities is a safer bet than assuming everything will go as expected. They all wanted ultimate security in responding to the question "what if something goes wrong?" - their jobs were on the line.<P>Second, they wanted <b>extreme scalability</b> - they all believed the move toward horizontally scaled grids (lots of little systems, 'scaled out'), would give way (as it always does) to smaller numbers of bigger systems ('scaled up'). We're seeing that already, with the move toward multi-core cpu's creating 16, 32, 64 even 128 way systems in a single box, lashed together with very high performance networking.<P>But scalability applies to management overhead, as well - having 16,000 virtualized computers is terrific (like 16,000 puppies), until you have to manage and maintain them. Often the biggest challenge (and expense) in a high scale datacenter isn't the technology, it's the breadth of point products or people managing the technology. So <b>seamless management</b> had to be our highest priority, with extreme scale (internet scale) in mind.<P><a> <img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 120px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/wintel.jpg" /></a> </p> <P>They wanted a <b>general purpose, hardware and OS independent approach</b>. That is, they wanted a solution that ran on any hardware vendor they chose, not just on Sun's servers and storage, but Dell's, IBM's, HP's, too. And they wanted a solution that would support Microsoft Windows, Linux and not just Solaris. Ideally embraced and endorsed by Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and not just Sun. <P><b>And finally, they wanted open source</b>. After years of moving toward and relying upon open source software, they didn't want to reintroduce proprietary software into the most foundational layer of their future datacenters. Some wanted the ability to "look at the code," to ensure security, others wanted the freedom to make modifications for unique workloads or requirements.<P>And with that feedback, the answer to the above seemed obvious to one attendee, "why can't you guys just use Solaris?" They all ran Solaris in mission critical deployment, all appreciated its performance, they loved the diagnosability (via <A HREF=http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115755300770755096-R2Ct41cQ4ZIPMwk4_xh0xU_HnQI_20061011.html">delivered via DTrace</A>), and the capacity to scale to the largest systems on earth. It was the perfect answer until one of the customers asked, "do Windows customers want to run Solaris? I don't think so." The "Solaris" brand didn't convey OS neutrality - and that neutrality was core to what we were thinking. But we knew the underlying inventory of OpenSolaris innovations would certainly give us a fabulous headstart.<P> <a> <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/software/products/xvm/index.jsp"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 230px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/stevewilson/resource/xvm-portfolio.jpg" /></a></A> </p> That's the rough backdrop to what drove our <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-09/sunflash.20080910.1.xml">virtualization announcements</A> last week - a desire to solve problems for developers and datacenter operators in multi-vendor environments. If you look to the core of our xVM offerings, you'll see exactly how we responded to the requirements outlined above: we integrated DTrace for extreme diagnosability. We leveraged the scale inherent in our kernel innovations to virtualize the largest systems on earth. We've built a clean, simple interface to manage clouds (called xVM OpsCenter, <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/stevewilson/entry/an_update_on_xvm_server">click here for more details</A>), to address management and provisioning for the smallest to the largest datacenters. And everything's available via open source (and free download), endorsed by our industry peers (watch <A HREF="http://channelsun.sun.com/video/featured/featured+media/1631259652/introducing+sun+xvm+virtualization+portfolio/1785267263">these launch videos</a> to see Microsoft and Intel endorse xVM - no, that's not a typo, Microsoft endorsed xVM). We even leveraged ZFS to get a head start on storage virtualization (the next frontier).<P>And why call it xVM? To make sure everyone knew we weren't simply targeting Solaris - xVM virtualizes Microsoft Windows, Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL, all other distros) alongside Solaris (8, 9 and 10). Customers can consolidate those operating systems, and similarly consolidate their hardware infrastructure - and use xVM OpsCenter to manage and maintain the whole plant. <P><a> <img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 120px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Champagne.jpg" /></a> </p> This week, we're unveiling a full line of desktop to datacenter virtualization offerings, covering desktop virtualization (xVM <A HREF="http://www.virtualbox.org/">VirtualBox</A>), datacenter virtualization (xVM Server), high scale management (xVM Ops Center), and Virtual Desktop support (xVM VDI and SunRay). All endorsed and supported by the industry, and all in use by some of the most powerful customers on earth. <P>And to that end, I'd like to offer my thanks to the customers who were present at that event a few years ago, and offer my sincere congratulations to the teams involved in bringing xVM to market, across Sun and our partner community. <P>With all the celebration around xVM, perhaps our next customer event should be held in Champagne...<P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/focusing_on_storage</id> <title type="html">Fanning the Winds of Change in Storage</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/focusing_on_storage"/> <published>2008-09-07T20:20:32-07:00</published> <updated>2008-09-13T07:44:27-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="analysts" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="hurricanes" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="netapp" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="storage" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="thumper" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">It's been over a month (and three hurricanes in America) since I've posted a blog. More than a few of you've noticed - thanks for the prodding...<P> <a> <img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 120px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/fan.jpg" /></a> </p> <P>It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).<P>One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity analysts publish research that feeds the investment community - their (free) research and financial analysis accompanies buy/hold/sell recommendations to investors (who hopefully generate trading fees for the analyst's employers).<P>This one analyst hadn't historically followed Sun, and was in the process of developing his first rating. He wanted to focus on our storage plans - more and more of the customers whom he interviewed were focused on storage, and many were talking up a specific open source software technology: <A HREF="http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/">ZFS</A>. (Before meeting with me, he'd talked to colleagues in his own IT shop, and was impressed to find some who admitted to running ZFS at home - nothing like touching your customers where they live... if you'd like to have ZFS sent to you, <a href="https://www2.sun.de/dct/forms/reg_us_2307_228_0.jsp">click here</A> or on the LiveCD shown at right.)<P> <p> <a href="https://www2.sun.de/dct/forms/reg_us_2307_228_0.jsp"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 120px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> </p> <P>Granted, you can see an increasing focus on storage at Sun - the acquisition of MySQL is as much a storage acquisition, as an enhancement to Sun's developer offerings. Discussions of flash memory, the economics of archiving, the Lustre parallel file system, all point to an increasing focus on what Sun sees as an exceptional opportunity for customers (and thus, investors). Storage and computing are converging - and we're about to bring the trends that transformed the server industry a few years ago (mass engagement in open development communities, and scale achieved via clusters of commodity parts vs. proprietary technologies) to the historically closed and proprietary storage industry. <P>Now, the notion of "engaging customers in open development communities" doesn't sit well among some traditional storage analysts (or our competition) who believe "Storage is too mission critical to tolerate open source software." Although I appreciate that wisdom and experience, I think the market's more nuanced than that - mission critical environments don't tolerate unsupported software, true, which is why we offer 24x7 commercial support for ZFS (on Sun hardware, and <A HREF="http://www.dell.com/solaris">Dell</a>, even). But broad global adoption of key open source projects will continue to drive change deep into the world's datacenters. Gartner's prediction that 90% of world's companies will run open source software didn't specify where they'd be running it - "everywhere" is the safest bet.<P>But back to the equity analyst - he patiently asked, "Great theory, but when will you see revenue results?" <P>"Last year," I responded. "You're seeing it accelerate."<P> <a><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 150px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/X4500_lowres.1024x768.jpg" /></a> </p> <P>As many folks know, we shipped our first ZFS based storage systems in 2007 - known as <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4540/">Thumpers</A>. Thumpers finished up this last year generating around $100m in billings, up 80% year over year. From a capacity perspective, we delivered roughly 90 petabytes of Thumper storage in FY2008, to some of the most demanding storage installations on earth (up ~200% y/y). What's fueling the growth? Adoption of ZFS is a clear driver (<A HREF="http://sysnet.sunwarp.net/maps/?lat=27.371767300523047&lng=-15.8203125&zoom=2&mtype=Blank">this chart</A> gives you a sense of where we're seeing adoption - thus revenue opportunity). But ultimately, customers are recognizing they can save money, space and power. <b>Thumpers are roughly twice the capacity in half the space at half the cost of the competition - $1.20/Gigabyte.</b> (They also run Windows and Linux with the same hardware economics). <P>Now, our view is "OpenStorage" (systems built from commodity parts and open source software) will grow far faster than the proprietary storage market. We plan on driving that growth, and over the next few months, you'll see a tremendous amount of storage innovation targeting the growing breadth of customers wanting better/faster/cheaper/smaller options. Expect to see flash, zfs, dtrace, and good old fashioned systems engineering play a very prominent role in an aggressive push into the storage market.<P>And in case you missed <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-09/sunflash.20080905.1.xml">our announcement</A> last week, our progress was validated by industry analysis - IDC said customers are growing their disk storage business with Sun far faster than with any of our proprietary competition. And at three times the rate of the overall market's growth. A great place to start.<P><a href="http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/weather/hurricane/sfl-rebpalmtrees29jan29,0,4799509.story"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 175px;" src="http://www.sun-sentinel.com/media/photo/2006-01/21618526.jpg" /></a> </A></p> <P> If you'd like to know more, and might be interested in taking a Thumper system for a free trial run, just <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/applyonline.jsp?puuid=391d17f4-e2fe-11db-8c3c-080020a9ed93">click here</A> and pick the country in which you're located. We supply most systems at Sun for free trials across the globe (yes, we even cover shipping to you). If you like the system, please buy it. If not, we'll take care of getting it returned to Sun, you owe us nothing. (That's the closest we can get to free hardware downloads...)<P>As I said to the analyst, you need only look to the results we're already delivering to see the linkage between open innovation and revenue growth. ZFS won't transform demand for our legacy products, but it'll certainly transform the opportunity and industry unfolding before us. But don't just get our opinion, the best folks to validate our approach aren't at Sun, they're among the storage buyers finally feeling the winds of change - at their backs.<P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/mysql_wins_at_linkedin</id> <title type="html">MySQL Wins at LinkedIn!</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/mysql_wins_at_linkedin"/> <published>2008-07-29T13:05:53-07:00</published> <updated>2008-07-29T13:05:53-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="database" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="linkedin" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="microsystems" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sun" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:msft" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:orcl" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="web" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">I was with a customer last week, who leads technology and operations for one of the world's largest companies. We were talking through his priorities for the upcoming year, and on a page filled with various traditional priorities (consolidation, energy management, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance) were two interesting words.<P>"Open Source."<P>I asked what that meant, why it was there. He said they'd done an audit of the firm's development activities, and found an overwhelming number ("hundreds") of open source <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 120px;"SRC="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/Opensource.svg/180px-Opensource.svg.png"></A></A>projects that had been completed behind the scenes, beyond management's oversight. The projects were designed to solve problems deemed too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies - from meeting a tough budget, to automating a new process. And rather than fight the trend, they figured it was delivering real benefit, something to explore more fully. And they were asking for Sun's help.<P> <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 120px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> </p> I'm seeing this with nearly every customer I meet, the invisible hand of open source - communities of individuals equally devoted to their employers, and to personal and peer productivity. These communities, within companies as well as across industries, are solving problems without having to involve procurement (while religiously adhering to policies surrounding privacy, intellectual property protection and software licensing). They're delivering unquestionable value.<P>Now, is unprescribed technology usage all that unusual in the workplace? I don't think so - it's similar to choosing your favorite search engine or social network, choices we all make (even CIO's) without purchase orders, that definitely bear on workplace productivity. Most progressive CIO's are trying to embrace this trend rather than fight it, figuring out how they can mandate as little as possible, not as much as possible - selecting only the most critical policies and standards to drive efficiency or compliance.<P><A HREF="http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 120px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/MySQL_Logo.jpg"></A></A> The invisible hand of open source adoption is definitely changing IT, and it's changing Sun's market opportunity - in software, <A HREF=" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/28/sun_dziuba_tm/">servers</A> and storage systems. Before Sun acquired them, MySQL had already established themselves among the world's open source communities, and invisibly penetrated an enormous breadth of companies across the world. From where I sit, the acquisition changed MySQL's standing not so much among developers, but among traditional technology decision makers - by bridging the divide that separated them. A well adopted product became a safe choice for enterprise deployment. The acquisition opened new doors and business dialog - we've seen a substantive increase in sales and download activity since it was announced. We've also seen a fair number of CIO's, as above, asking their teams - "where are we using MySQL?" The answers are always interesting.<P>As those conversations transition to sales cycles for MySQL Enterprise subscriptions (for those seeking mission crtiical support, eg), the number one question I get asked by traditional customers has become... "...but does MySQL scale?"<P> <A HREF="http://www.linkedin.com"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 100px;"SRC="http://www.linkedin.com/img/pic/pic_logo_119x32.gif"></A></A> And there's no better way of putting that question to rest than citing the global businesses powered by MySQL - at least one of which is often used by the very individual asking the question: LinkedIn. Click <a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080728/20080728005247.html?.v=1">here</A> to read how Sun and LinkedIn are working together to serve one of the world's largest, most valuable, and fastest growing social networks - at truly global scale.<P>At the pace LinkedIn is growing, they will be managing services to far more accounts than most of the world's banks... and building exceptional value along the way. (And if you haven't signed up yet, you <A HREF="http://www.linkedin.com">really ought to</A>...)<P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/solaris_on_wall_street_faster</id> <title type="html">Solaris on Wall Street - Faster and Faster</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/solaris_on_wall_street_faster"/> <published>2008-07-03T00:16:33-07:00</published> <updated>2008-07-03T00:16:33-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="intel" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="reuters" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="rmds" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="thomson" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:intc" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><p> </p> <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 100px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/107/275875386_0f451dc838.jpg" /> </a> </p> I remember a dinner I had a while back with the CEO of a global financial services firm. As one of his first acts as CEO, he'd cancelled an enormous outsourcing contract, and I'd asked him why - his response has stuck with me. &quot;Banking is a technology business. Pure and simple. I can't win if I don't have my own team.&quot; <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; height: 120px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> </p> <p>Independent of his views on outsourcing, I've heard the same point made by many (but not all) financial services executives - banking (like big swaths of telecommunications, media and retailing) has become a technology business, where every ounce of performance and differentiation matters. Even, and especially, in the midst of market turmoil. </p> <p>Which is a fitting backdrop for a joint <a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080701/20080701005384.html?.v=1">press release</a> we just issued with Intel - in which we achieved a land speed record - a <b>million messages per second</b>, running the Reuters Market Data System on Solaris 10 for Intel silicon (see release for details). To our colleagues at Intel and Thomson Reuters... thank you! Performance = market advantage, energy savings, or datacenter consolidation&nbsp; - or all of the above. Customers get to pick.<br /></p> <p> And following up on my last post on the impact of flash memory and ZFS on the world of datacenters, our own Adam Leventhal has added a far more fulfilling technical perspective in <a href="http://mags.acm.org/communications/200807/?searchterm=adam+leventhal&amp;pg=49">Communications of the ACM: Flash Storage Memory</a>.Worth the read...<br /></p> <p><br /></p></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/not_a_flash_in_the</id> <title type="html">Anything But a Flash in the Pan</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/not_a_flash_in_the"/> <published>2008-06-10T15:00:00-07:00</published> <updated>2008-06-10T19:56:59-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="flash" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="nas" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ssd" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="storage" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:aapl" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:ntap" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><p>There are only two kinds of storage devices - those that have failed, and those that are about to fail. That's the view most datacenters have about the traditionally mechanical devices pejoratively referred to as &quot;spinning rust.&quot; All disk drives fail, cheap drives fail faster. <a><img style="margin: 10px 20px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 180px;" src="/jonathan/resource/JBOD.jpg" /></a> </p> <p>If the average time to fail is five years, you and your laptop can make do with the occasional backup. But when an average enterprise has 100, or 1,000, or increasingly 10,000 or 100,000 individual disk drives, failure is a daily, if not hourly occurrence. Mechanical devices fail.<br /> </p> <p>And with failure comes the potential for losing data - using commodity disks to save your boss $500,000 does her no good if she's fined $50,000,000 for violating data retention regulations. Stock transactions, medical images or feature length movies - take your pick, some data has to be perfect. Not a decimal point or pixel out of place.</p> <p>That's exactly why, years ago, Sun invented a storage platform called ZFS. ZFS makes a powerful assumption - that a reliable system must be built from unreliable parts. By using surplus computing cycles, ZFS constantly runs powerful integrity checks, giving data corruption no place to hide. With ZFS, customers can use the cheapest disks and simplest systems, and get exceptional data integrity, along with massive reductions in cost and complexity. </p> <p> <a><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 170px;" src="/jonathan/resource/DRAM.jpg" /></a> But there's a new option on the table, known to many by the memory cards they use in their phones, iPods or digital cameras - called Flash memory. Flash is very fast at reading and writing data, like DRAM (the memory chips in your computer). Its price sits squarely between DRAM and traditional disk drives. But unlike either alternative, Flash requires <b>no power</b> to remember data. And with the price of electricity escalating across the world, keeping 10,000 disks spinning at thousands of rpm can cost you in power what you pay for your storage. Power has become <a href="/jonathan/entry/hugging_customers"><b>the dominant factor</b></a> in high scale hardware decisions - and Flash is set to disrupt the industry. </p> <p>Historically, there have been two impediments to using Flash in the enterprise. </p> <p> <a href="http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/flash/Products_FlashSSD.html"><img align="right" style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 170px;" src="/jonathan/resource/Flash2.jpg" /></a> The first was cost. Flash is more expensive per gigabyte than a comparable disk drive. But with every increase in the cost of electricity (and <a href="http://www.storagesearch.com/semico-art1-fig1.gif">decay</a> in the price of Flash memory), Flash's relative cost <i>per available gigabyte</i> is quickly improving - remember, disk drives have to be powered on to be available. And although a gigabyte of mechanical disk might cost you less than a gigabyte of Flash memory, the latter is at least an order of magnitude faster in reading and writing data - so the cost <i>per gigabyte served</i> is exceptionally low.</p> <p> <a href="http://www.opensparc.org"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 170px;" src="/jonathan/resource/CPU.jpg" /></a>But simply introducing Flash as yet another tier of storage in a datacenter isn't the real opportunity - that adds new costs and a set of new management hassles. To truly change the industry, adding Flash would have to be completely transparent to users and operators, alike, with no switching or operational cost. And that's exactly what we're doing with ZFS. ZFS will <a href="http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/uts/common/fs/zfs/arc.c#3377">transparently incorporate</a> Flash into the storage hierarchy of a running system, using the microprocessor cache for the most performance sensitive tasks, DRAM for the next, then Flash, then disk (then ultimately <a href="/jonathan/entry/moving_a_petabyte_of_data">tape</a>). ZFS will allow Flash to join DRAM and commodity disks to form ahybrid pool automatically used by ZFS to achieve the best price, performance and energy efficiency conceivable. Simply put, our storage and server systems will get enormously faster - without any upgrade to the microprocessor. Adding Flash will be like adding DRAM - once it's in, there's no new administration, just new capability. <br /></p> <p>That's one reason we're so excited by Flash - the cost <i>per available gigabyte served</i> (the total operational cost of storage) plummets with Flash in the mix, especially for data or performance intensive applications (like MySQL, Postgres, Oracle or SQL Server). From the right systems designs, Flash has the potential of providing orders of magnitude improvements in economics and performance - and with the advent of Sun's <a href="http://openxvm.org/learn.html">xVM</a> hypervisor, we can bring this performance benefit to any host operating system (running atop xVM, Windows operators can inherit the benefit of ZFS+Flash, too).&nbsp; </p> <p>The second problem is trickier - simply put, although Flash memory can be read an infinite number of times, writing to Flash more than a few hundred thousand times can wear it out. Now, most normal humans will never hit 500,000 writes in a digital camera. But you might in your enterprise. What to do? </p> <p><a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 5px 10px 0px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 130px;" src="/jonathan/resource/zfs_white.jpg" /></a>Again, ZFS to the rescue.</p> <p>ZFS treats Flash memory like any other storage medium - remember, all storage devices fail - and manages data integrity whether failure's induced by a bad hard drive motor, write-fatigue or a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naKd9nARAes&amp;%u205E%u205E%u205ENR=1">hammer drill</a>. <a href="http://www.onlinetips.org/cordless-hammer-drill"><img style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 150px;" src="http://www.onlinetips.org/images/hammer-drill.gif" /></a> Increasingly sophisticated &quot;wear leveling&quot; algorithms are also maximizing Flash lifespans - evening out write activity to avoid hot spot failures. But the bottom line is this - with ZFS at the helm, wear is a non-issue (on hard drives or Flash - they both have wear limitations, after all).</p> <p>These are the premises behind Sun's systems approach to Open Storage. We're integrating ZFS, Flash memory and some exceptional hardware/silicon innovations to deliver high performance, low power, general purpose storage and server appliances - accelerating <i>any software that runs on our SPARC or x86 systems </i>(MySQL users, in specific, will see a big turbo charge). For a fraction of what <a href="http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080529163415471">proprietary NAS storage</a> ordinarily costs. Expect our first Flash systems to ship toward the end of this calendar year. </p> <p> <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 120px;" src="/jonathan/resource/OpenSolaris_CDimage.jpg" /> </a> </p> <p>And as you might expect, ZFS and all the underlying software will be free without commercial support - OpenSolaris, ZFS, MySQL and Postgres are already available (click the image at left to get a free LiveCD - or check out Apple's release of ZFS in <a href="http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/snowleopard/">Mac OSX</a>). Software revenue will come from those enterprises that want Sun's technical support for mission critical deployment. On the hardware side, Sun's <a href="http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/index.jsp">Try and Buy</a> programs allow any partner or customer to order one of our systems for free 60 day trial - if you love it, buy it. If not, we'll cover the return postage. <br /></p> <p>If the above doesn't make it obvious... our view is Flash is anything but a flash in the pan - as the price of power continues to increase, and the price of Flash continues to plummet, the combination of Flash, ZFS and true systems innovation will have an even bigger impact on datacenter economics than virtualization. </p> <p>It's that big a deal.</p><hr width="100%" size="2" /> <p> </p> <p><b>UPDATE</b>:&nbsp; You may have seen we added yet another company to the list led by Intel, IBM and Dell supporting Solaris (and thus ZFS) as OEM partners - this morning, we officially announced the <a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080610/20080610005598.html?.v=1">addition of Fujitsu-Siemens</a>. Congratulations, all... <br /></p></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/population_matters</id> <title type="html">Growing in the P7 (not just the G7)</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/population_matters"/> <published>2008-06-02T13:26:00-07:00</published> <updated>2008-06-02T15:10:41-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="bric" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="brica" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="odf" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="openoffice" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ovum" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:msft" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:nyt" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">De facto standards are the only ones that matter. <p> That's a bit of a truism in the technology world - well intentioned standards bodies and departments of justice can do their best, but at <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/business/worldbusiness/27telecom.html"><img style="margin: 15px 20px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="/jonathan/resource/emergingconsumers.jpg" /></a> the end of the day, volume deployment is the only setter of standards. Ubiquity trumps policy, just about every time. <p> To that point, I was on a panel recently, discussing the impact of technology on the world's more rapidly developing economies (what's often referred to as &quot;BRICA,&quot; or Brazil, Russia, India, China and Africa). <p> One of the speakers referenced an interesting shift in the traditional media industry: western companies were turning their attention toward the developing world. GDP growth wasn't drawing their attention - as much as demographics. Teenagers and those in their early twenties represent the biggest media buyers in the world, spending a greater portion of their income on music, movies and entertainment than any other age group. And the majority of people fitting that age profile live, by definition, in population centers - not in the US, UK, or Germany, but BRICA. Whose collective population represents <em>nearly half the entire planet's</em>. Think of the Ovum analysis from the New York Times, pictured on the right, more as growth in media outlets - and remember, more people in the world see "the internet" on their phone, than on a PC. <p> The impact of that shift in buying power won't be limited to traditional media. The software industry is a media industry, as well - technically, the two have fully converged (a digital file is a digital file, whether it's OpenSolaris, MySQL, a new <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=DqJlEVvr52Q">Jay Chou</a> video, or a champion cricket highlight). The infrastructure to distribute and manipulate that content (eg, servers, networking, storage and infrastructure software) is increasingly geared to serve consumers - the &quot;business to consumer&quot; (or, B2C) segment of the IT marketplace is growing far, far faster than &quot;business to business&quot; (B2B). <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Chou"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 90px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/jay1.jpg" /> </A> <A HREF="http://www.opensolaris.com"><img style="margin: 29px 0px 10px 10px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 30px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/os_com_logo.jpg" /> </A> <A HREF="https://video.cricinfo.tv/video_player.aspx?channelId=CHCricInfo','CricInfoPlayer','width=720,height=1021'"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 10px; float: left; cursor: pointer; height: 90px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/cricket.jpeg" /> </A> And where will the market for such network computing infrastructure be largest? By definition, where the markets are centered - near consumers (more than half of whom now live in urban environments, well covered by mobile network service). If B2B caused the IT industry to concentrate in proximity to economic centers (the G7), B2C focuses our attention on consumers and population centers (the P7?). That's a profound change. </p> <p>So with that backdrop, I've made a few significant changes to how Sun's organized, focusing leadership and resourcing around two new areas. </p> <p>First, as many folks know inside of Sun, I announced the addition of Lin Lee to my staff, to manage relationships with governments and NGO's across the world. Based in Shanghai, Lin will advocate Sun's vision of sustainable network infrastructure, encompassing open source and document formats to power efficient datacenters - we've already found a very receptive audience in emerging economies. Lin's focus will be helping students, universities and governments to lower the barriers to indigenous opportunity. <p><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 180px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/flowersprout.png" />I also announced today a new leader reporting to me for Sun's Global Sales and Services organization, Peter Ryan. He's also added to his staff a new business region, Emerging Markets - with a new leader (Denis Heraud). Emerging Markets, representing a basket of rapidly developing economies (BRICA included), will be a peer to North America, Europe and Asia. Last quarter alone, our BRICA business grew in double digits - this change is designed to accelerate that growth by adding new focus, resourcing and strong leadership.<P> Peter (who disclosed to me only this weekend that he started his career as a mainframe systems engineer!) replaces Don Grantham. (Don's leaving Sun to help HP secure a Solaris license before their EDS transaction closes...) <P> <a href="http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray2/"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 120px;" src="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/sunray_small.jpg" /></A> Rapidly developing economies have, of late, started throwing their weight around in the world of traditional IT standards - and have been among the most assertive in embracing and <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-03/sunflash.20080304.2.xml">deploying</A> free/open source software. Quite naturally, they've also been among the most concerned about sustainable technology practices: 100,000,000 new PC users, each drawing 200 watts, certainly paves the way for social and economic progress - at the cost of ~20 gigawatts of new coal fired power plants. Now you know why our SunRay desktops, at 4 watts apiece, have been of such interest in the developing (and developed) world. <p> <p>Bluntly put, we're elevating our focus on developing economies because that's where free software, and Sun's businesses, are growing fastest. Where is OpenOffice deployed in the greatest numbers? In places where saving $300 per desktop is meaningful. <p> No wonder those economies are so <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/30/brazil_appeals_against_oomxl/">passionate</a> about open standards - their citizenry will ultimately make them the most important decision makers in the world. <br /> </p> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/transparency_and_choice</id> <title type="html">Transparency and Making Choices</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/transparency_and_choice"/> <published>2008-05-18T09:09:44-07:00</published> <updated>2008-05-20T10:32:33-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="culture" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="earthquake" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="relief" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="transparency" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><p>Not long ago, I was sitting across from the CEO of a media company. He showed enormous pride in the social value of his organization - in delivering news to the world via a global team of thoughtful, award-winning journalists.</p> <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Sichuan_earthquake"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0px; cursor:pointer; width: 180px;"SRC="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/2008_Sichuan_earthquake_map_no_labels.svg/240px-2008_Sichuan_earthquake_map_no_labels.svg.png"></A> <p>He asked what made me proud to be at Sun. Among a number of things, I said I'm proudest of the role Sun plays in making sure stories like his are told - "Our technologies, after all, are how your journalists file their stories, and we play a central role in how you present them to the world via the network." I am unreservedly proud of Sun's role in making the world a more open, transparent place.</p> <p>Beyond professional journalism, the network is a social utility for the world's citizenry - whose digital cameras and cell phones and blog postings and emails form a tidal wave of transparency. We live in a world whose traumas and triumphs are visible instantaneously. Sunlight's not just a great disinfectant, it's a wonderful safety net, too - you can't fix the problems you don't know about. But once you know about a problem, even small attempts to help, multiplied over the long tail of the internet, can make an extraordinary difference.</p> <p>Over the past few days, the world has watched an earthquake in China lead to the death and dislocation of countless thousands. The San Francisco Bay Area, where Sun is headquartered, has felt the impact deeply - beyond co-workers, friends and family, we've suffered our own traumas with earthquakes. A cyclone in Myanmar triggered similar thoughts among those of us effected by hurricanes in New Orleans, Louisiana. <p>But the world's an increasingly transparent place. And any help, from $1 to $1m, multiplied over the world, makes a difference. <P>Which is why I'm sending personal funds to the relief organizations I trust to bring aid to those stricken. <P>And I'm encouraging you to take the time to make a similar choice. <P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/rocking_the_free_world</id> <title type="html">JavaFX as Rich Internet Application Platform</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/rocking_the_free_world"/> <published>2008-05-13T22:59:53-07:00</published> <updated>2008-05-13T22:59:53-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="amazon" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="javafx" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="kindle" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="netbeans" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ria" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:adbe" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:amzn" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:msft" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><P>JavaOne wrapped up on Friday. We hosted individuals from across the globe, and from every industry: consumer electronics and gaming, to enterprise IT, space exploration, factory automation, the automotive industry, academia - like the network itself, Java delivers something for nearly everyone, everywhere.<P><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; width: 180px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/java_dev.jpg"> <P>This year's biggest announcements centered around Java's role in the future of rich internet applications (or RIA's). What's a rich internet application? It depends on your perspective - from mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.<P>On the one hand, I'd claim Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one. Early Java applets delivered interactivity, but at the expense of development complexity and, in the early days, performance - when a browser, and more recently Javascript, would suffice.<P>But browser based applications are hitting complexity and performance limits, and content owners are striving for higher levels of engagement (via high definition video, or advanced interactivity). Developers are demanding something new - the browser's a wonderfully accessible programming model, but it's a weak deployment model for rich/disconnected applications. <P>An unspoken driver of RIA is also business model evolution - many companies behind rich applications are seeking independence from browsers and search engines, whose default settings and corporate parents present a competitive threat. There's a growing appetite for locally installed applications that build rich, direct <b>and permanent</b> engagement with consumers. No one wants to pay a toll to meet their own customers.<P>With that in mind, as we looked to reinvent the Java platform, we heard a consistent set of requirements. And not just from coders, but from sports francishes seeking to directly engage their fans, media companies wanting to bypass browser defaults, to artists and businesses and device manufacturers - everyone's looking to uniquely engage consumers via the network. These audiences have nearly identitical requirements for a RIA platform - they want technology that:<P> <ul><small> <li type=square>Reaches every internet consumer - on desktops, mobile, and new devices, too.<br><li type=square>Delivers high performance - and the ability to engage creative professsionals in the design process.<br><li type=square>Leverages existing skills and enterprise infrastructure.<br><li type=square>Is totally free, and open source.<br><li type=square>Provides content owners with control and ownership of their own data.<br> </small></ul> <P>At JavaOne last week, we addressed every one of those issues - here's how: <P> <b>First, RIA developers want to reach every consumer on earth, and on every device.</b><P> Why? Because the market is in front of consumers - no matter what screen they may be using. Desktop, mobile phone, personal navigation, digital book - you name it. The market's in front of all the screens in your life, not just a PC.<P> <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/" ><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; width: 180px;"SRC="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/digital/fiona/general/Kindle_C1_03._V10214354_.gif"></A>That said, on PC's alone, Java's popularity has grown in the last few years, as measured by runtime downloads - we routinely download 40 to 50 million new Java runtimes a month, and update more than a <i>billion</i> every year. <A HREF="http://www.ubuntu.com/" ><IMG style="float:right; margin:10px 20px 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; width: 100px;"SRC="http://www.ubuntu.com/themes/ubuntu07/images/ubuntulogo.png"></A> The adoption of the Java platform exceeds the adoption of Microsoft's Windows itself - Sun's <A HREF="http://www.java.com">Java runtime environment</A> (JRE) is preloaded on nearly every Windows machine (from HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.), but also runs on Apple's Macintosh, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSe, Solaris and OpenSolaris desktops. In addition, a JRE is present on billions - yes, billions - of wireless and mobile devices, from automobile dashboards and navigation devices, to Amazon's Kindle (did you know Amazon's Kindle is a Java platform?).<P>Which is to say, the Java platform reaches more people than any other software technology the world has ever seen.<P> <b>Second, RIA developers want performance, functionality AND simplicity. </b><P> Why? Because content owners and application developers want to engage consumers - and want to engage artists and creative professionals in the workflow. <P> Java's history with simplicity isn't perfect - which is why our teams have rewritten the applet model, and focused so intently on making the new consumer Java runtime environment (download a beta version <A HREF="http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javase/java6u10/index.html">here</A>) exceptionally fast to load within a web page, exceptionally performant for complex interactivity, and trivially accessible to consumers. We've also simplified Java with a scripting language, JavaFX script, that enables creative professionals to engage with coders to create immersive experiences, while embracing the creative tool chain (from interaction design to pixel manipulation) used by the worlds designers and digital artists.<P> <A HREF="http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13568_22-200560.html" ><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; width: 200px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/fxapplets.jpg"></A> And I'm really pleased we've solved the desktop installation problem, by making JavaFX applets separable from a web page with a simple drag and drop (click the image above to watch this demonstrated). Developers can now bypass the browser to trivially install apps on desktops - once the applet's dropped on the desktop, content owners have a direct relationship with their consumers.<P> You might have also seen that we're adding full high quality audio and video codecs to Java on every platform on which it runs - resolving another gap for RIA developers, support for time-based media (click <A HREF="http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13568_22-200368.html">here</A> for a demo of high performance video). <P> <b>Third, enterprises want to reuse their existing Java skills and assets in moving to RIA.</b><P> Nearly every enterprise employs programmers with Java skills - it's still the number one internet language taught across the world, and found pervasively in global business infrastructure. As businesses move to engage their customers via RIA platforms, reusing existing skills, and connecting RIA's to existing systems, gives the Java community a unique ability to build from what exists - rather than attempt to replace it. <P> <A HREF="http://www.opensolaris.org"><IMG style="float:left; margin: 32px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 200px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/opensolaris_little.jpg"></A></A> <A HREF="http://dev.mysql.com/downloads"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 30px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 100px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/MySQL_Logo.jpg"></A></A> <a HREF="https://glassfish.dev.java.net/downloads/v2ur1-b09d.html"><IMG style="float:center margin:0px 10px 0px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 100px;"SRC="https://glassfish-theme.dev.java.net/logo.gif"></A> <A HREF="http://www.netbeans.info/downloads/index.php"><IMG style="margin: 24px 0px 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; width: 130px;"SRC="http://www.netbeans.org/images/v5/nb-logo2.gif"></A><P> This familiarity also allows businesses and developer teams to focus on engaging with consumers - rather than irritating IT with new infrastructure requirements (JavaFX developers simply link to existing enterprise infrastructure, vs. requiring new systems for RIA apps).<P> <b>Fourth, RIA developers want free and open platforms.</b><P> Why free? Because developers don't want to encumber their applications with royalty bearing dependencies, or use technologies that predefine where consumers might appear. You don't build <em>developer</em> communities around closed source, you build <em>user</em> communities - <A HREF="http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 110px;"SRC="http://openjdk.java.net/images/openjdk-small.png"></A> and this is an instance where developer selection and adoption will define the broadest RIA marketplace. JavaFX will, like all of Sun's software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it'll be released via the GPL (v2) license.<P> And lest you think free and open software is the province of those with goatees and tattoos... we're seeing a rising tide of developing nations mandating free and open software in government and academic procurement. Why? To protect choice, and build indigenous opportunity - there's no reason to build dependencies upon proprietary software if you can avoid it. <P> <b>Lastly, lets face it, the real <A HREF="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=3">value in Web 2.0 is the data</A> - not the app. And that data is YOURS. </b><P> <A HREF="http://www.microscope.com" ><IMG style="float:right; margin:10px 0px 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; width: 150px;"SRC="http://www.microscope.com/product_thumb.php?img=images/OMSZ55L_main.jpg&w=138&h=200"></A> If you've been watching the social media space as carefully as we have, you understand the value of instrumentation and intentionality in building a business on the web. Knowing what users are doing with your product, whether it's a <A HREF="http://www.cricketweb.net/fantasycricket/">fantasy cricket</a> league or a consumer banking application, enables more innovative business models, the delivery of higher value services, placement of more valuable ads - data allows for better decisions, and better value creation (and bluntly put, higher <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action">CPA</A>). <P>But most rich internet applications are built, then deployed - into a fog. Developers who leave the confines of the browser either lose access to information about what their users are doing, or have to rely upon a technology provider that's inserting itself into their data stream. And some of those technology providers compete with content developers. <P>With a project code named <b>Project Insight</b>, we'll be instrumenting the Java platform to enable developers to harvest the data stream generated by their RIA content. JavaFX developers can focus on their business models - rather than enhancing someone else's. <P> _______________________<P>With all that said, what's the success of JavaFX worth to Sun? <P>By definition, it's worth more to Sun than the adoption of someone else's platform (known as "positive option value") - and the proprietary infrastructure used to serve it (don't forget, RIA's have rich internet back-ends (RIBs?). And in the RIA world, all the options are going to be priced at free, anyways - this isn't a contest to be won on price.<P>From where I sit, the platform likely to win will be the one that sets developers free - to pursue markets, opportunities and customer experiences as they define them, not as vendors define them. Now, <A HREF="http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/media_shell.jsp?id=FRdamp267542">setting developers free</A> - that's where we can excel. It's in the DNA of everything we do.<P>For developers, learn more <a href="http://www.javafx.com">at JavaFX.com</A>. And be sure to check out <A HREF="http://www.netbeans.info/downloads/index.php">NetBeans</a> - like Java itself, it's starting to rock the free world...<P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/opensolaris_amazon_mysql_and_glassfish</id> <title type="html">OpenSolaris, Amazon, MySQL and Glassfish... Clouds Parting</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/opensolaris_amazon_mysql_and_glassfish"/> <published>2008-05-08T10:32:48-07:00</published> <updated>2008-05-08T11:42:01-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="cloud" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="computing" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="glassfish" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="opensolaris" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:amzn" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="zfs" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">We made some big announcements this week at our annual developer forums, CommunityOne and JavaOne. I thought I'd highlight a couple in particular. <P> <A HREF="https://www2.sun.de/dct/forms/reg_us_2307_228_0.jsp" ><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; width: 200px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/Opensolaris.jpg"></A> We announced the first commercial release of OpenSolaris - targeting high speed developers and development teams (not consumers...). OpenSolaris focuses on developers wanting to be freed from proprietary software models, who see innovation and automation in operating systems as a source of competitive advantage.<P> If Solaris 10, OpenSolaris's older brother, is for IT departments prioritizing carrier grade stability over rapid innovation, OpenSolaris targets the exact opposite - developers, from high performance computing to social networking, that prioritize a constantly refreshing repository filled with community innovations (and ZFS-based automated rollback) over an unchanging qualification target. Go to <A HREF="http://www.opensolaris.com">OpenSolaris.com</A> to download a free copy, or click on the OpenSolaris logo to have a bootable CD delivered to you (free of charge). Or if you want a simpler way of trying it out... just go to Amazon!<P> <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_l_1?ie=UTF8&node=391556011&no=3440661&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA" ><IMG style="float:right; margin:10px 0px 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; width: 150px;"SRC="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/00/10/00/14/19/27/100014192753._V46777512_.gif"></A> We also announced a <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_l_1?ie=UTF8&node=391556011&no=3440661&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA">partnership with Amazon</A>, through which we've made OpenSolaris, alongside MySQL and Glassfish, available with commercial support on Amazon's elastic computing cloud. From where I sit, this is a profound change in the industry - the world's most popular database is now available, and commercially supported, as a cloud service. As is the fastest growing Java container, and a redefined OpenSolaris for the modern world.<P> <A HREF="https://glassfish.dev.java.net/public/downloadsindex.html" ><IMG style="float:left; margin:-15px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 90px;"SRC="https://glassfish-theme.dev.java.net/logo.gif"></A> The traditional software industry, first revolutionized by open source, next by software as a service, is now embarking on a third revolutionary change... infrastructure as a service. <P>Sure feels like the clouds are parting.<P>(And again, if you'd like a free copy of OpenSolaris sent to you on a bootable, "live" CD, just click on the OpenSolaris logo above.)<P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/our_q3</id> <title type="html">Our Q3</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/our_q3"/> <published>2008-05-04T15:47:00-07:00</published> <updated>2008-05-15T09:09:20-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="startupcamp" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="startupcampmay08" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><P>We announced the results of our third fiscal quarter (Q3) on Thursday last week, and the results weren't what I, or any of us, wanted.<P><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; width: 100px;"SRC="http://www.netbanker.com/Images/glass6.jpg"> As you can read in the <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/earnings_releases/pr/fy08q3/index.html">press release</A>, we delivered $3.267 billion in revenue for Q3, roughly flat with a year ago. On that revenue, we delivered a GAAP loss of 4 cents (equal to the charge associated with the acquisition of MySQL, which closed within the quarter) - on that revenue, we generated around $320m in cash.<P>The low light of the quarter was revenue in the US - which declined year over year by nearly 10%, a big step down for a geography that typically contributes 40% of our total revenue. The highlight of the quarter was our India performance, up 30% year over year - and our chip multi-threading Niagara systems, which grew (billings) 110%. <P>We had growth in 12 of 16 geographies in which we sell, but a shortfall in the world's largest economy (and the largest in Sun's portfolio), is tough to make up elsewhere. So we showed no growth at the corporate level.<P>Despite a weak US economy, we still see growth and opportunity across the world. We are going to be making some changes as a result of the quarter, certainly, but not in our core vision or strategic direction - network infrastructure is being built out across the world, developers will continue to define its architecture and shape demand, and we will continue to position ourselves to drive and capture that market.<P>With that, I'll go through a few questions:<P><b>What happened in the US? </b><br>Late in the quarter, we saw a fairly aggressive slowdown - among smaller customers, and for larger systems (like enterprise servers and large tape libraries). As you recall, we left Q2 with a healthy backlog, lots of momentum, and feedback from customers that we were totally on the right track, so we were as surprised as anyone that deals started stalling in early March.<P><b>Why did big systems slow? </b><br>It's counterintuitive, but larger systems and purchase orders's are easier to slow down than smaller purchases. When you sell the systems and storage behind a big buildout, it's typically a long selling cycle, and a fairly long implementation process (systems aren't powered up the day they arrive). So holding off for a few weeks, either because you're spooked about the US mortgage crisis or because your CFO decided to put a pause on capital spending, is fairly straightforward.<P>And remember, our business is a portfolio - from high growth, low end blades and training services, to slower growth, high end enterprise systems an infrastructure software. There is no one system or product for all workloads, it's a portfolio.<P><b>So how are you going to adjust going forward? </b><br>We'll continue to diversify our business - geographically, and with the introduction of our <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/storagetek/openstorage/index.jsp">Open Storage</A> initiatives this past week and acquisitions like MySQL and Vaau, we'll continue moving into adjacent markets.<P>We also announced a restructuring plan, through which we'll be making targeted reductions in operating expenses. The net result will be the elimination of up to 2,500 jobs.<P>To be clear - we are taking assertive, and prudent steps to focus on growth opportunities, and to pull our cost structure in line with our business model. As we've done in years past, we're doing both - making choices to invest and disinvest.<P>Evolving companies are never done making choices.<P><b>Where did you grow in the quarter? </b><br>In 12 of the 16 geographies we serve - including India (up 30%), Brazil (up 20%), up in China, Russia, the Middle East, Canada, to name a few places. In general, the world continues to look to technology as a source of growth, automation and efficiency. Even our Wall Street business was up this past quarter.<P>On the product front, our focus on energy efficiency continues to pay off, with Niagara systems grew (billings) 110% year over year, and our newest (AMD, Intel and SPARC) blade systems growing at an even higher clip. The MySQL team delivered a great growth quarter, and Service revenues were up 3% (a major portion of which are software related, of course). Disk storage billings were up 6%.<P>Deferred product revenues were again up nicely, more than 25% - these deferred revenues tend to be for higher end systems and more complex configurations, with gross margins above the corporate average. Deferred Services were down, attributable to the ERP transition I mentioned earlier (we expect to recover that in Q4).<P><b>What didn't go well? </b><br>Enterprise systems, which were great growers in Q1 and Q2 (20% and 8% growth, respectively), were down in the quarter - and not specifically attributable to competition. We saw exceptional performance on our APL systems built with Fujitsu, and a strengthening partnership. Tape libraries were also down, although media sales were strong. <P>Given the size of both these line items, our higher volume lower end businesses were not yet at a sufficient scale to eclipse the slowdown on the lower volume, high end systems. <P><b>Why don't you just stop giving your software away? </b><br><P>Because we prioritize developer adoption. Let me give an example. <P>Last week, we saw a very high profile media company raise a considerable sum of money. They had not otherwise been on our radar. I sent a note to the head of our global sales team, given the fundraising had cited a growing infrastructure buildout, and asked if we'd made contact. <P>He said no, but we were immediately reaching out - and it turns out they're completely built around MySQL. <P>So before we arrived, before we were engaged, and before they began building out a large infrastructure, the MySQL team had scored a design win - ahead of the proprietary competition. What should we have charged them beforehand? No matter what it was, they wouldn't have used the product - startups and developers don't pay for software. But here's a diffrent question: what would we have paid them to select MySQL over the proprietary alternatives before embarking on a massive expansion? <P>Right question. We didn't pay them, the MySQL team <em>earned</em> their adoption.<P> <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/startup"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 400px;"SRC="http://mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/startup-camp-logo.png"></A></A> Will they buy a license now? Maybe not, but we'll be well positioned if and when they, like Facebook or Nokia or the New York Times, do. And in the interim, it costs us nothing for the reference. I was with a bunch of startups at our StartupCamp this morning, and asked how many folks in the audience *didn't* use free software... no hands were raised. Why are we focused on startups? Because we're focused on all developers, in big companies and small.<P><b>How do you feel about the competition? </b><br>Just fine, we looked at the deals slowing in the US, competition wasn't our big issue - it's not that someone else was getting the purchase order, it's that no PO was being issued in the quarter. We're more exposed to the US markets, and potentially more exposed to discretionary purchases (although I don't really believe that servers are more discretionary than storage - they're <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/storagetek/openstorage/index.jsp">converging</A>). <A HREF="http://seekingalpha.com/article/73887-avnet-s-vallee-fyq2-hurt-by-server-sales-slowdown">Avnet</A>, one of our big distributors, had a similar experience in the US.<P><b>Why didn't you pre-announce the quarter? </b><br>We wanted to be sure, when we made our announcements, to have finalized our numbers and our plan to adjust our cost structure going forward. Given we're in the midst of an ERP transition, we were still finalizing work late into April. Secondarily, we needed to review our FY 2009 restructuring plan with the board before going public. We announced as soon as we'd met, reviewed and approved the plan. <P><b>How did you lose money compared to a year ago profit? </b><br>Well, although we generated a lot of cash in the quarter (more than $320m from operating activities), we also incurred a number of charges which reduced our net income. These included non-cash items related to stock-based compensation and amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets as well as other acquisition-related charges - all of which added up to 20 cents worth of charges.<P><b>Are you repurchasing your own shares? </b><br>We don't comment on buyback plans, but we'll report any potential purchases at the end of the quarter. <P><b>When will the US recover? Will the malaise spread overseas? </b><br>We build network innovation at Sun, we don't predict the global economy.<P>And with that, you've hopefully got a clearer sense of what we saw, and what we see. So I'll end on a particuarly vexing question, <P><b>"Why does Sun's CEO waste time writing that blog?"</b><br>Because I believe in providing clarity surrounding our strategy and operations - not just once a year in the Annual Report. I believe clarity behind our direction is useful for our shareholders, customers, partners and employees.<P>In good times, and in challenging ones.<P>________________ <P>Safe Harbor Statement<P>Jonathan's blog contains forward-looking statements regarding the future results and performance of Sun including statements with respect to the effects of our restructuring plan, and expectations for deferred revenue. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in such forward-looking statements include: risks associated with developing, designing, manufacturing and distributing new products; lack of success in technological advancements; pricing pressures; lack of customer acceptance of new products; the possibility of errors or defects in new products; competition; adverse business conditions; failure to retain key employees; the cancellation or delay of projects; our reliance on single-source suppliers; risks associated with our ability to purchase a sufficient amount of components to meet demand; inventory risks; and delays in product development or customer acceptance and implementation of new products and technologies. Please also refer to Sun's periodic reports that are filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2007 and its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2007 and December 30, 2007. Sun assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements.<P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/freedom_s_choice</id> <title type="html">Freedom's Choice</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/freedom_s_choice"/> <published>2008-04-14T13:14:00-07:00</published> <updated>2008-04-14T13:14:46-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="free" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="mysql" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="open" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="software" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="source" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="ticker:java" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">Today is the opening day of the <A HREF="http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/content/home">MySQL User Conference</A> - so I thought I'd describe a recent customer interaction related to the acquisition.<P><A HREF="http://www.mysql.com"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 200px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/MySQL_Logo.jpg"></A></A> A few weeks ago, I was visiting the Chief Information Officer of a large commercial institution. He had with him the company's Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Security Officer (known as the "see-so"), and a series of lieutenants from various parts of their (large) development organization. <P>The Sun team had spent the day reviewing our progress together, and was finishing up with a product roadmap presentation. From what I sensed, it'd been a good day, so when I arrived, it was mostly to say thanks for the business, and ensure everyone had my contact info in the event I could help out going forward.<P>We had just closed the acquisition of MySQL, so before I wrapped up, I asked, "And would you like a quick update on the newest addition to our family, MySQL?"<P>The CIO responded categorically with "we don't run MySQL, we run [<em>name withheld to protect the proprietary</em>]." The CISO said, "We can't just let developers download software off the net, you know, we've got regulation and security to worry about." The CTO smiled. Everyone else appeared to be sitting on their hands. I was going to leave it at that. Thanks for the business.<P>Until a (diplomatically) assertive Sun sales rep piped up, "Um... no, I connected with a buddy of mine over at MySQL, and had him check - you've downloaded MySQL more than 1,300 times in the last twelve months."<P><A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_(Monty)_Widenius"><IMG style="float:left; margin: 10px 13px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 350px;"SRC="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2416/2414423398_2711e9df3f.jpg?v=0"></A></A> After a profoundly awkward silence, one of the individuals from their internal development team piped up, "Actually, everybody uses it. Why bother hassling with license agreements when MySQL's got you covered. We're stoked you bought them."<P>Awkward silences aside, we've now got a very productive engagment with the customer around delivering commercial support on a global basis to what's turned out to be the most popular database inside their development shop. They're finding more and more applications for MySQL, and more ways to save significant time and money in moving toward the future. <P>And that experience - of a CIO not knowing how ubiquitous and valuable free software has become to their organization - isn't atypical. In fact, it's the norm, and a divide we're gently trying to bridge.<P>Opportunity's <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/who_picked_your_search_engine1">everywhere</A>. <P>So is free and open software.<P>They might even travel in pairs.<P></content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/the_video</id> <title type="html">Which is the Real Poisson D'Avril?</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/the_video"/> <published>2008-04-02T14:44:25-07:00</published> <updated>2008-04-02T19:17:28-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="april" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="d'avril" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="day" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="fish" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="fools" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="poisson" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="prank" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="sakila" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><P>If you'd like the backstory on the April Fool's video making its way around Sun (below)... it goes like this. <P>My normally trustworthy administrator let me know I had a lunch appointment with my normally trustworthy friend, Ted. So I went to a normally trustworthy restaurant, where the normally trustworthy host walked me to my table - and past a series of video cameras I foolishly didn't notice. Ted lets me know he's managed to connect with Dan, a normally trustworthy colleague, who's put him in touch with a technical expert I might be interested in meeting.<P>Ted lets me know the guest is flying up from Los Angeles. And that he's been in an accident that might impair his ability to speak. Pay special attention at minute five, marking the first time I've seen anyone make a chicken out of a dinner napkin.<P><object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yUdFqW7vRc0&rel=0"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/yUdFqW7vRc0&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355" align = left></embed></object><P>Let me be the first to point out that the video shown was highly edited. The good (and, notwithstanding this prank, normally trustworthy) people who edited the footage exercised appropriate restraint for a global audience unaccustomed to diluvian drooling. How uncomfortable was it at the table? Having watched the unedited version with a Sun colleague before it was posted externally, she remarked, "Look how well your Mother raised you, you didn't even stare."<P> <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHOPavgsM4M"><IMG style="float:left; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 250px;"SRC="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2101/2382287119_5e38bd9907_m.jpg"></A></A> <P>On a far more civil note, Sun's headquarters were also attacked by a herd of <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHOPavgsM4M">squeaky dolphins</A> yesterday, swimming in formation from right to left... rumor has it they were on their way to meet with a representative of their community who now leads our database business. <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHOPavgsM4M"><IMG style="float:right; margin: 10px 0px 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; width: 250px;"SRC="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2017/2382286931_0704902997_m.jpg"></A> <P>Oh, and Bill Macgowan is still at Sun. <P>I hold him personally responsible for my designation as the real <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day">poisson d'avril</A> (dolphins aren't fish, after all, they're mammals), and I'll forever view him with a lingering suspicion... but he's still here. <P> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/a_new_strategy</id> <title type="html">Give it Back.</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/a_new_strategy"/> <published>2008-04-01T12:35:08-07:00</published> <updated>2008-04-01T12:35:08-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="april" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="day" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="fools" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="joke" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html">As you know, Sun's open source software and microprocessor strategy has been, at times controversial. We've filled trade journals and chat rooms with all kinds of dialog and the occasional crackpot conspiracy theory.<P>As many have rightly assumed from the outset, that controversy was, in fact, not a byproduct of the strategy - it <em>was</em> the strategy: if you're talking about Sun, you're not talking about the other guy. And then you'll buy a datacenter.<P><A HREF="http://www.conflictmanagement.org/"><IMG style="float:left; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 200px;"SRC="http://www.protectmystaff.co.uk/users/www.protectmystaff.co.uk/upload/The%20way%20personal%20safety%20hand%20grab.jpg"></A></A> But now that we've firmly established our reputation for open source leadership, I'm very worried there's no more controversy to be had. There's too much trust in the system, and too much clarity around our strategic intent. So it's getting tougher and tougher to kick up a storm - and we can't very well spend a billion dollars or change our ticker symbol every time we want to generate a headline. Now can we?<P>So today I'd like to unfurl the second chapter of our strategy.<P>We want you to give it all back. You couldn't possibly believe we'd let you keep it, did you? <P>We specifically request that all free software originally distributed by Sun Microsystems, related to software or microprocessors, including but not limited to source files, binaries, derivatives, extensions, applications, patents, patent applications, copyrights, ideas, thoughts, and derivative thoughts, along with any and all mirrors thereof, be returned immediately.<P>In addition, (we know this is the risky part, but we need to get the privacy advocates twittering, too), we demand all data processed, stored or created by such intellectual property, up to and including all data held within file systems, databases or open source productivity applications be returned, as well. Up to and including the book report your kid just typed on OpenOffice. <P> <A HREF="http://www.opensolaris.org"><IMG style="float:left; margin: 32px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 200px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/opensolaris_little.jpg"></A></A> <A HREF="http://dev.mysql.com/downloads"><IMG style="float:left; margin:10px 30px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 100px;"SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/resource/MySQL_Logo.jpg"></A></A> <a HREF="https://glassfish.dev.java.net/downloads/v2ur1-b09d.html"><IMG style="float:center margin:0px 10px 0px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 100px;"SRC="https://glassfish-theme.dev.java.net/logo.gif"></A> <A HREF="http://www.netbeans.info/downloads/index.php"><IMG style="margin: 24px 0px 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; width: 130px;"SRC="http://www.netbeans.org/images/v5/nb-logo2.gif"></A><P>We'd like to request this all be returned within thirty days. <P>Thank you for your understanding. <P>______________________________<P><i>And although it pains me to say this, we do live in a litigious society, so: YES, this is an April Fool's joke, as defined by relevant sections of the United States <A HREF="http://www.sec.gov/about/laws.shtml#secact1933">Securities Act of 1933</A>.<P></i> </content> </entry> <entry> <id>http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/april_fools_day1</id> <title type="html">Do I Still Have a Job?</title> <author><name>Jonathan Schwartz</name></author> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/april_fools_day1"/> <published>2008-03-28T19:00:00-07:00</published> <updated>2008-03-28T19:25:56-07:00</updated> <category term="/General" label="General" /> <category term="april" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="bib" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="day" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="fools" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <category term="prank" scheme="http://roller.apache.org/ns/tags/" /> <content type="html"><A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/ceo/mgt_macgowan.html"><IMG style="float:left; margin: 5px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; width: 150px;"SRC="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/ceo/pics/img-macgowan.jpg"></A></A><P>This is Bill Macgowan. <P>Bill is Sun's <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/ceo/mgt_macgowan.html">Chief Human Resources Officer</A>. <P>Which means he works with me to build and cultivate talent at Sun. <P>He's bright, well spoken, and usually exercises good judgement. <P>Usually. <P>But today, he perpetrated a prank. On me. An <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fool's_Day">April Fool's Day</A> prank. <P>Executed early enough to turn into a video for the enjoyment of Sun's employees on Tuesday (April Fool's Day). And if I have the courage to publicly display my gullibility, it'll be here, on this blog, in front of a global audience.<P>The prank, like any good Silicon Valley practical joke, involved a venture capitalist, a drooling visitor, a bib and lamb chops.<P>Owing to the graciousness with which my parents raised me, I suffered through the prank. Without staring. Focused on the business at hand.<P>Having no idea it was a prank.<P>Until all the camera men appeared. At which point I picked up on the notion something wasn't quite right. I had been spoofed.<P>Upon my humbling return from lunch, Bill caught me in the hallway. He asked, with his ill-gotten video in hand, "so do I still have a job?"<P>And I have until Tuesday to think up a creative response.<P>Remember, my office mate is the CFO, and the General Counsel writes a blog. Surely there's an opportunity for clever repartee.<P>Surely :)<P> </content> </entry></feed> If you would like to create a banner that links to this page (i.e. this validation result), do the following:
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