The community showed up in full force last week in San Francisco, CA for JavaOne. To kick things off the CommunityOne day had the OpenSolaris 2008.05 release on center stage. Lot's of Live CDs were distributed and even more downloads occurred last week. For those of you who could not attend you can get the image to download and burn a CD by clicking the big grey arrow inside the circle below. For those of you who do not want to download you can have a CD mailed to you free of charge by... Read Full Story
A year ago Sun announced its OpenStorage initiative. OpenSolaris is enabling the open storage revolution with the industry's first open storage software community and it is thriving and growing. Companies are actively contributing source code as well as building appliances and solutions with this OpenStorage software stack. This is not a head on battle with proprietary storage vendors. Rather it is a flank. OpenStorage provides customers the advantage of a global community, with all the... Read Full Story
Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Here is a clip from his last lecture. Gut wrenching but at the same time some worthy advice. Make it count... I certainly do and can relate to him. ABC News will be showing a program this Wed April 9th, 2008 @ 10pm/9 CST. Here's to Randy. Read Full Story
When I first viewed this video I was amazed more than my kids. I'm still in awe with what can be created when you pull various engineering disciplines together. The mechanics, digital electronics and software enable this machine to perform as an almost living organism. The gas engine sound is a good clue that you are seeing a machine. However if you turn the volume down and view at a distance you will think otherwise. A machine that can be kicked, slip on ice, climb in snow and leap tall... Read Full Story
Another storage code base has been posted at opensolaris. This most recent contribution focuses on the area of hierarchical storage management (HSM). The technology is much more than standard backup. It addresses automated data management via policies driven by data and metadata. HSM drives some of the largest data repositories out there in the industry today. With our open sourcing of SAM-Q we have completed an extremely large complex effort of open sourcing our *entire* storage stack... Read Full Story
I've just returned from beautiful Johannesburg, South Africa and Tech Days. It was a very busy week of interacting with developers and many customers. Africa is another continent going through rapid change. The growth opportunities are tremendous and South Africa is another example of the new global economy. The people and climate are great. The Pilanesburg National Park is spectacular and beautiful. At Tech Days in Johannesburg we demonstrated an enterprise open sourced operating... Read Full Story
I am XAM. XAM I am. Sun recently made another open source contribution-- this time in the space of fixed content storage software. Fixed content storage is growing at an exponential rate. As an example, stop and imagine how much fixed content data will be generated by the Summer Olympics 2008. Pictures, video, tickets, security data, statistics, invoices, hotel bills, airline reservations, etc, etc. etc. A massive amount of data that will be stored and preserved digitally for a long time... Read Full Story
A few weeks ago I was in Germany for a HPC planning session. I flew into Frankfurt and then took a local flight to Munich. From Munich the ride to Regensburg was about 1 hour. Regensburg is a beautiful medevil town with plenty of history dating back to the Roman Empire. Original structures have been built upon which include fortresses, bridges and churches-- but you can also visibly see that the town is part of modern day Europe. After 2 full days of discussion topics which included... Read Full Story
Mårten Mickos the CEO of MySQL hit upon a key trend in the web core also known as SAAS, web hosting services, internet cloud, etc. . "Some people spend time to save $$$ and some people spend $$$ to save time. In the open source arena the majority of folks (actually it's a pretty vast majority) are spending the time to save the $$$. 50,000 downloads a day of the most popular open sourced database is an eye opener. That certainly sounds like a vibrant and active community to me! People who... Read Full Story
Few can say that storage is not one very hot topic in the IT sector today. The internet has created quite a medium for content delivery of podcasts, blogs, webcasts, webinars, etc. This blog itself is an example. Storage solutions are abundant, but don't forget that some storage vendors charge you for every neat feature. Yes you pay for that special hardware that does compression to save storage space. You also pay for every one of those protocols that you need (iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, etc... Read Full Story
