Hadoop Tipping Point

If you’ve ever been to a Hadoop or Big Data meetup, typically it’s full of developers in jeans and sneakers indulging in pizza and beer while engaging with one or more presenters (also engineers in jeans and sneakers). Lots of demos with lines and lines of command outputs and code scrolling across screens more quickly than my eye can capture, never mind my mind grok. And everyone is happy, cuz it really is all about pizza, beer and code.

From Morton Grodzins, UChicago poly sci professor “in sociology, a tipping point is a point in time when a group–-or a large number of group members–rapidly and dramatically changes its behavior by widely adopting a previously rare practice.” This past week I witnessed what I believe is a tipping point in the world of Hadoop and Big Data.

Cloudera hosted a session in Boston on “Getting the Most from Hadoop”. The Boston Hadoop User Group was among the invitees. I snagged a latte after driving into rainy Boston for the all-day event, registered, and then found myself in a hotel event room, with scrambled eggs and BACON (possibly better than pizza and beer in my book). I navigated the room, chatting up some peeps, and found that almost no one there had used Hadoop at all. Few had downloaded it, experimented with it, and many weren’t really certain what to do with it. I took a closer look, and saw more khakis than jeans (even though I was still sporting mine) and many more shoes than sneakers (well, I wear heels to most meetups, so I have little to comment on there). It was weird.

Then the event started. Kicked off by a team of Cloudera marketing and sales peeps – all in suits! A couple formal presos – one from a sponsor – followed. All powerpoints, not code scrolling rapidly across screens. I started getting really nervous – surely this was not appropriate for the Hadoop audience.

Yet no one left the room. Everyone was intently listening. The guy next to me was taking pictures and had a stack of business cards that he had collected from anyone he could. The guy on the other side of me asked if my company used Hadoop, and wanted to know how we got started. I spent a bunch of time talking to people about how Hadoop and the traditional data warehouse can play complementary roles, which seemed to be a huge concern from the audience.

And that’s when I realized Cloudera had helped ‘tip’ Hadoop from the original group of early adopters to a broader audience. The room was full of enterprise IT peeps. Wow.

It was the worst? or best? of times…

One year ago today my hubby crashed his mountain bike and was paralyzed from the neck down. I’ll never forget that phone call from his biking buddies, the ambulance ride, standing in a deserted hallway at UMass Emergency, days in the ICU, months in Spaulding rehab, and months on months working his ass off at home on every nerve, muscle, body functions, mediation – you name it – a spinal cord injury affects everything in the body and everything has to be worked to recover.

Ed at a charity event this March

I kissed Ed this morning, shook his hand, and told him to give me a kick in the ass – all of which worked well. He is well down the multi-year recovery road – able to walk, limited use of his hands – although he has many battles still to fight, some seeming more exhausting than the ones already past.

I want to thank each and every friend – the support you all gave us this past year is what made this past year a great year, even though it was a tough year. Charles Dickens said it well… but I had to change the order of each phrase to really express what I mean…

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities
Modifed by AmyO: A Tale of Two Perspectives…

It was the worst of times (pain and despair), it was the best of times (friendship and strength), it was the age of foolishness (how little we know), it was the age of wisdom (how much we learned), it was the epoch of incredulity (how could this possibly have happened), it was the epoch of belief (it really is possible fight to get better), it was the season of Darkness (oh no, the spinal electrical shocks continue to cause more damage), it was the season of Light (when an amazing neurosurgeon fixes that bad issue), it was the winter of despair (no need to explain), it was the spring of hope (we’re out walking!), we had nothing before us, we had everything before us, …

Thank you all for your support. Love you!

Hadoop World Take Aways

I deeply respect innovation and innovators – which is why I was thrilled to get to hear Doug Cutting speak at Hadoop World, and to meet the original Hadoop (Doug’s son’s stuffed elephant). Not that I can find much in common between Hadoop the elephant and Hadoop the framework for scalable, distributed compute and store. At Nokia we’re using the latter Hadoop to help us manage large amounts of semi and unstructured data. That data is our most important asset for enabling what we call the third wave of mobility – where we index the physical world in order to make it as simple and compelling to navigate the real world as it is to navigate the web. Kinda cool, huh? I talk about that some more in my interview with TheCube.

The Hadoop World conference was great – lotsa good speakers, interesting topics, new learnings. Beside being struck by conference growth (doubled from last year in number of attendees, which doubled from the year before), I had a few key takeaways:

1. Organizing people to deal with Big Data is a challenge. We’ve devised what we call a collaborative working model at Nokia, where our central analytics team provides the technology, the data asset, and a foundation for analytics – which can then be used by data scientists and analysts through the company. This organizational model resonated with a number of attendees at the talk I gave on Big Data and organizational change.
2. Hadoop is NOT a one-stop-shop, for anyone. Building a Big Data environment is about building an ecosystem. Ecosystem of apache projects, of course, but also as you implement you must make an ecosystem leveraging existing SQL, BI, stats tools. This makes adoption and implementation easier because you slide Hadoop under a lot of existing technology, which is particularly important in a company the size of Nokia – ain’t gonna change the way 60 thousand people work overnight.
3. I love being a buyer: I’ve spent most my career on the vendor side of the house. Of course I love the attention from having a nice budget, but the real perk is being able to look at all the technology and figure out what makes sense for my business problem…vs peddling one solution over ‘n over.
4. Everyone is hiring. Data is BIG and there are not enough technical or business leaders that know how to take advantage of the opportunity. This is a young industry with non linear opportunity. Just about every presentation at the conference ended with “We’re Hiring”. It got to be the joke of the conference after a while.

Oh, by the way, “At Nokia we’re hiring”.

Color my ‘LinkedIn’ world

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about storytelling and visualization. Listened to a great talk today at the Chicago Predictive Analytics conference by Scott Nicholson from LinkedIn. He talked about approaching analytics from the perspective of an economist vs a computer scientist. An economist will care about causation, while a computer scientist will care about probability. During his talk he used some very good visuals, and of course he’s dealing with interesting data (cuz it’s about all of us). So I checked out one of the tools he mentioned on the LinkedIn site to color my world. Causation for this network? There’s a high probability it was work, study, play…

Cell Phone Faux Pas

 

 

My dear friend @Softwear_Chic, who knows all about what’s chic in this world, tweeted this link today while watching college football: 10 cell phone faux pas you really shouldn’t make.

A few minutes later I saw someone tweet the infograph to the left. But check it out: three of the most frequent places and times cell phones are actually used are on the faux pas list:

#2  Dinner

#6  Bar (or when seriously imbiding)

#10 Bathroom

Guess we’re just not capable of being “in the moment” anymore.

It was a very good year… when I was… 17? 21? 35?

…yah those years were fun – and I’ll admit this past year wasn’t my seventeenth, or twenty-first or even my thirty fifth as Sinatra crooned. While I turned just a bit older during the past 525,600 minutes, more happened than even Sinatra coulda imagined. My two daughters left the nest, and I had a blast visiting them in their new homes in diff areas of NC. I started a new job running product management for cloud services at Nokia, graduated from Northeastern’s executive MBA program, and the next day started a new job as head of analytics at Nokia. I traveled internationally a buncha times: Mexico, Finlandx4, China, Hong Kong, India, Germany twice. OMG saw the most amazing places and met some incredible peeps. Just check out the view from my hotel room in Agra.

Ain’t nothin slowing down around here. Who said “age considers; youth ventures”? I’ll stick with “how sweet it is!”.

I like Clouds

OK, I like clouds. Nah, not those big ones that have been dumping lots of white stuff on us this week. But I do like the ones that prevented Punxsutawney Phil from seeing his shadow this morning – maybe once I dig out from this storm we’ll see that early spring! And I also really like the clouds that are enabling our new way of working, living, communicating. A couple months back I re-entered the workforce after a pleasant sabbatical – I had been considering opportunities in four different spaces – all places that have piqued my interest over the past few years.

• I wanted to work in mobile, because we all are mobile these days, and as IDC predicts “shipments of app-capable, non-PC mobile devices will outnumber PC shipments within the next 18 months”.
• OR I wanted to work in BigData. Back when I was in Sun storage I was awed by the challenge of storing data efficiently – as Eric Schmidt recently said “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003” and the challenges around storing, retrieving and anayzing data have increased exponentially.
• OR I hoped for more work with social media. After spending most of my sabbatical designing and implementing social media strategies for non-profits, I had a taste of where the world is going from a communications perspective. Social media is turning it inside out.
• BUT REALLY I wished for something interesting  in the cloud world – what a fascinating paradigm shift for the compute and data worlds. It simply doesn’t make sense for so many people in the world to be managing servers and storage systems – cloud answers a basic competitive advantage question.

And then I came across an intriguing opportunity at Nokia: to run product management for Nokia’s cloud services. A cloud that stores mobile app data… A cloud that delivers analytics… A cloud that enables social networking… So, I do like clouds. Just not those bad ones outside right now. D*mn gotta go shovel again. D*mn clouds.

The black line is the top of my patio table

Front sidewalk - where can I put the snow?

Goshdarnit!

Sitting here thinking about the error messages I see every day from the technology surrounding me. Like right now facebook is down and it’s not saying much about why. In most cases the error messages, or lack thereof, make my level of frustration even worse than that associated with the loss of service. Which is why I do appreciate humor in error messages, like this one from wordpress. I wonder how Matt feels about it though 🙂

Tweeting for the Newbie

I’m a huge twitter fan – it’s an incredible source of information, a good discussion forum, and all-out entertaining to boot! My passion seems contagious, because recently a number of friends have asked me how to get on twitter and what to do once they’re on… So here are my seven easy steps for getting started. And once you’ve started, follow a few people like @TweetSmarter and @twitter to learn more quickly.

1. Go to twitter.com and create your account. On the ‘Account‘ screen your username will be what people see when you tweet (mine is ImAmyO). Then go to ‘Profile and fill out your bio with some interesting stuff about yourself and post a pic. No need to mess with the mobile settings or your screen design – always time later for that…

2. Follow someone. Are any of your friends on twitter? Or find someone famous that does something interesting (I follow @MarthaStuart cuz I like to know what she’s eating). Follow the news (I like the CCN Breaking News feed @ccnbrk). Follow someone in your industry, again if they’re posting cool stuff. Use ‘Find People‘ in the upper corner of your screen to look for people. Go to twubs.com and enter a word that is important to you – on twitter the word is called a hashtag cuz you can put it in your tweets as a flag so others can easily find info on a subject. Twubs will show you a bunch of tweets on the subject – you’ll see #<the word you entered> in the tweets. Follow some of the people tweeting on your topic of interest. Then go to the profile of each person you follow, by clicking on their name in your following list, go to their following list, and follow some of them! Look for people who tweet topics of interest to you, and especially people who include a lot of links to other site – that’s where twitter starts to become a good knowledge-base.

3. Tweet something. Come on. What are your reading? What have you seen? What do you know that would help others? Post a link in your tweet to something you read online. Post a link to a picture. And here’s a tip – since a tweet can only be 140 characters, you don’t want to waste them on long links. So go to bit.ly.com and enter the long link (sometimes I post links to NYT articles that are almost 100 characters) and bit.ly will give you a short link instead.

4. Retweet something. Huh? Yup, this is the essence of twitter. When someone you follow says something interesting, you can retweet it so that all your followers see it. Now don’t get too caught up in the fact that you probably don’t have too many followers yet, retweet anyways cuz on twitter retweeting is seen as the highest form of flattery…

5. …besides following someone who follows you – that’s also a twitter form of flattery. As time goes on and you tweet / retweet more, and follow more people, people will start to follow you. They’ll find you because of your bio, what you tweet, and who you follow, and who’s following you (just like you did in step 2 above). So what should you do? Follow them back. For sure, not always, but click on their twitter handle and go to their profile page. Check out their bio, and what they’ve tweeted. If it’s interesting, follow them! That’s how the network builds.

6. Be informed and entertained. You can watch your twitter feed (that’s all the incoming tweets from people you follow) on twitter.com, but I like to use a different twitter app called TweetDeck. Download it from TweetDeck.com and you’ll see that you can arrange columns with different searches. I also love the way it pops the latest tweet up in the corner of my screen; I can scan to see what’s going on and quickly decide if I want to check the tweet out further. Retweets are easier in TweetDeck too, and there are TweetDeck apps for your smartphone as well.

7. Repeat steps 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in random order for infinity. You’ll be engaged, enlightened, and entertained. Enjoy!

The Old Give and Take

When I was helping my daughter unpack in her new apartment in North Carolina last week, I ran across one of her psychology books called “Influence: Science and Practice”. At first my interest was piqued simply because of all the talk in social media land about influence these days, but by chapter 2 I was hooked. It’s the same topics all over twitterland and facebookhaven. But down to the brass tacks – or should I say the science of psychology – of the basics of influence.

The textbook was copyrighted in 2001, well before the emergence of social media as a marketing channel. And it explains so well the basics of influence, upon which social media marketing relies. Chapter 2 was all about reciprocation – the old give and take. Take the experiment by psychologist Dennis Regan in 1971. Two subjects in a supposed  art-appreciation experiment were supposed to rate paintings. But one of the subjects was actually Regan’s assistant Joe, who had an additional role to play. In some of the cases, Joe would leave the room during a rest period and return with a Coke for himself and one for the other subject. In other cases, Joe would return with only a Coke for himself.

After all the paintings had been rating, Joe would then ask the subject to do him a favor. Joe was selling raffle tickets and would get a $50 prize if he sold the most tickets. And across the board the subjects who received a Coke from Joe bought twice as many raffle tickets as those who hadn’t received a favor from Joe. It didn’t matter if they liked Joe or not; if they felt they owed him a favor, they bought twice as many tickets.

Social media marketing is all about reciprocity. Give away content on your site that will help others. Retweet interesting information. ‘Like’ good products and services. Which creates a cycle that may help you.

The Influencer Project

60 speakers in 60 minutes? Yup, about a week ago I attended the shortest marketing conference ever – 60 speakers in 60 minutes discussing how to increase your digital influence. The Influencer Project, presented by ThoughtLead, featured key insights from people who spend lots of time using and thinking about social media. I took a few minutes to write down keywords these influencers used over and over during the conference. I attached a not-too-scientific weighting to each word, based upon number of times used directly and in context. With a little help from wordle, you can see how content, relationships and passion pop out. Kinda important for success in many aspects of life, even your digital influence. Interesting conference… Kinda like speed-dating for marketeers 🙂 I highly recommend a listen in here – it’s an hour well spent.

Time and Space

When I missed my sister’s phone call, she yelled at me on facebook “ur 2 busy blogging, twittering, fbing…2 p/u the old fashioned phone…” Truth be told, I often prefer online forums over voice conversations: the asynchronicity, the one2many-ness and many2one-ness, the visuals, the links, the networks. A community with subcultures that affect how we interact. Subcultures created by time and space.

Consider differences in the state of technology at the time of adoption. My daughters don’t naturally use the ‘comment’ and ‘like’ features on Facebook because those features didn’t exist at the time they started on FB years ago. Matter of fact, the news feed didn’t even exist. It wasn’t until FB opened up outside schools that those features were added. Go to the wall of 19-22 year old these days and you’ll see one side of a conversation – the other side is on someone else’s wall. Go to my wall and you’ll see interactive conversations among a disparate group of friends, all using the ‘comment’ feature to engage in a conversation. Same technology, adopted over different periods of time, causing major differences in the subculture among users.

And then there’s space. HBR just published a map showing social media usage differences by space, or locale. Internet users in India and China tweet 3x as much as those of us living in the U.S. Some our lower usage can be traced back to the reliability and relatively low cost of our old phone network; we think nothing of just picking up the phone here. But in developing nations, wireless and cellular networks often emerged before – and sometimes instead of – local phone networks. And by the time the Internet was available in many locales, microblogging technology had matured. With less predisposition for the phone, those users turned to the social network.

And then there’s Japan, where social networking is used to communicate among close circles of friends, not to extend those circles. And South Korea, where users approach social media from a gaming perspective. And France, … but you get the picture. While it may be one network, it’s certainly segmented by time and space.

I’m gonna sign off now and go call my sister on the old fashioned phone.

It’s the content, stupid

Linotype Machine

Not to point out the obvious, but with the low barrier to entry for using social media it’s pretty easy for anyone to say anything to anyone about anything these days. In contrast, my dad was trained as a printer in Ireland, and spent decades here in the U.S. working the night shift to produce the newspapers we relied upon for the news each morning. Reporters hunting down the scoop by day, editors fine-tuning the story in the evening, and my dad toiling through the wee hours setting the type. I loved waking up to the news he brought home each morning in that freshly printed paper.

These mornings I roll over and grab my iPhone off the nightstand. I click one of multiple apps to see what’s happened overnight. I check in on blogs, scan my twitter feed, make sure my facebook friends aren’t having major issues – all before I lift my head from the pillow. It’s over coffee that I turn to traditional media for more news: wsj, theregister, nytimes, … While I trust my friends to offer up their views on just about everything, I want their opinions supplemented by reporters hunting down scoops, backed by intelligent and thoughtful editors working the story.

That’s why I’m so intrigued by the Atlantic’s recent article on Google’s attempt to save traditional media. User generated content is often ad hoc, and it works best for me when supported by a system of professional journalists working the systemic stories.

The Sunday paper best exemplifies the traditional journalistic business model. All that news is paid for by the huge bundle of colorful ads that sit in the center of the folded paper. But in new media, the news doesn’t arrive in one convenient bundle that advertisers can use to push their message. And that one convenient bundle represents the traditional journalistic business model. But it’s not a question of whether we still need professional journalism, it’s a question of how to change the traditional media business model to support that profession.

Google acknowledges that they need the content produced by professionals to sustain the Google business model. And those professionals need to adapt as well to these changing times. The first thing to go will be the print, as more and more journalism goes on-line. That radically changes the cost structure of the news business. The second change is news aggregators, like Google News, directing traffic through content excerpts. And finally, the news will again be supported by ads, not in a bundle this time that falls out of your Sunday paper, but in on-line ads tailored to your interests via clickstream analytics.

So my dad no longer needs to set his linotype (good thing, cuz he retired and is now happy volunteering at a local cancer center), but we do need the journalists to feed content into our news ecosystem.

Mother’s Little Helper? Data

I’m fully supportive when my loved ones go off-the-grid on some new adventure. But the worrier inside me usually starts roaring around 3am… “Is everything ok?” “Where are they now?” Until recently it was pretty difficult to calm my worrier. But now, like the lyrics of the Stones, I’ve discovered my own mother’s little helper: Data. Yup, data.

In March my adventurer photographer husband spent 6 weeks in various parts of Africa working with children’s charities, exploring and mountain climbing. And attached to his backpack was a GPS sensor, which sent data about Ed’s whereabouts to a centralized service. I could go to the service website to see his location mapped, like his footsteps up Kilimanjara shown here. And I could post these satellite images to Facebook so friends and family could keep track as well. No more lost sleep. Saved by the data.

I was at an interesting conference this week where much was discussed about data. Stephen Baker, of Num3rati fame, delved into the next big wave of data coming from sensors in the world around us. Kinda creepy in many ways, but as with every new innovation, there’s a cost-benefit analysis to be done. In the simple case of the FindMeSpot, I’m all for it. We’re gonna have some interesting discussions, though, over the next few years as sensors become more prevalent around us. And we’re certainly not gonna suffer from a lack of data.

A marketeer’s dream

I’ve lived a marketeer’s dream for the past few months. I had a product that everyone loved and an event that everyone was looking forward to attending. I had a community of people who wanted to share. And I was tasked with raising awareness, strengthening the community, extending its reach. In marketing speak that’s basically strengthening the brand, driving retention, and generating more demand. Oh, and here I am living in the age of social media.

The product: a charity that brings happiness into the lives of seriously ill children. The event: a weekend-long bike ride that gives 100% of its donations to that charity. The community: a special group of volunteers, riders, and sponsors connected by a series of stories. Stories about their own children helped by that charity. Stories about friendships made over years of riding. Stories about helping one another through the good times and bad. Stories about fundraising. Stories about training. Stories about life and love. In marketing speak, that’s content the likes of which is rarely seen. Oh and did I mention the community is so dedicated to this charity, a few members even had the logo tattooed on their leg? Now that’s brand affinity!

Here’s where the road meets the Internet. We created an information architecture for this community, using its website for logistics info, using facebook for informal chatter and discussion, twitter for event updates, and an email newsletter and blog to share the stories. We took the online community from zero to several hundred in a couple months. Our riders and volunteers contributed more stories and pics and videos. We extended the event from one weekend to year-long. Because the community is more than the day of the event. Because social media extends the bounds of space and time.

As Seth said so well, you’ve gotta have passion about what you’re marketing. So yup, I’ve lived the marketeer’s dream.

I hate running in circles

A friend of my daughter is training for collegiate field hockey and has devised a plan to run varied distances each day towards her overall training goal. The thing is, Chicken (that’s her nickname, but I don’t think she’s afraid of much) says she hates to run in circles. So she took a map of Westford and found friends’ houses at different distances from her home. She runs the miles to a friends house, and then bums a ride back home so that she never has to run in circles.

I hate running in circles too, which is why I often gravitate towards strategy roles. But strategy is no ivory-tower event, to me it means three things: settling on one common goal, using the best of everyone’s ideas to create a plan as to where to focus, and mapping that plan against what is going on in the market. You end up with a goal that says we’ll grow revenue and margin by focusing on certain solutions through certain channels, a plan that says we adapt pricing and promotions for certain customers, and a map that shows how this plays out in meeting market demand and against the competition. And then you make sure the strategy works for your whole ecosystem of partners, suppliers, employees and customers so that you can all grow together.

Ya know, Chicken has a goal, a well-defined plan for each day, and a map so that she doesn’t end up running in circles. She is even leveraging her network of  friends for support. Now that’s a Chicken recipe with the right ingredients for success!

DeSchooling for the Geek in High Heels

When my daughter started unschooling a few years back, she went through a decompression period called deschooling: “the mental process a person goes through after being removed from a formal schooling environment, when the ‘school mindset’ is eroded over time. Deschooling may refer to the time period it takes for children removed from school to adjust to learning in an unstructured environment.”

I have been deSomethingOrOther-ing for the past few months. Getting a tough acquisition out of my mind; shaking off the bad vibes from a year of layoffs; turning to non-profit work, an executive MBA program, and assistant teaching about IP protection. The smile’s returned to my face, the light to my heart, and the energy to my blog.

I hope in my next life to return as an inventor, a Nobel Prize winner, or a RedSox starting pitcher. But in this life I am satisfied to surround myself with geeks and enjoy my role as a Geek in High Heels. So I’ve moved my Sun posts over here to WordPress, and will continue the journey chronicling my encounters with the geekiness around us.

P.S. Sun provided a license option for content originally posted on blogs.sun.com. This content was licensed to both Sun and the blog author, which allows for legal re-posts.

Where data center meets the cloud

I’ve seen lots of data centers. Big ones, small ones, pod-designs, diesel-powered, environmentally controlled. But I can’t say I’ve ever seen a data center like the one I encountered this week in Bermuda. We had climbed seven flights of winding stairs inside Gibbs Lighthouse – with only one flight to go – when we ran across a miniature data center about 100 feet above ground. It’s the data center that keeps the Gibbs lantern shining, so ships know they’re close to the lovely yet treacherous Bermuda shores.

Here’s what I learned from the placards inside the lighthouse: From it’s start in 1846, the Gibbs lighthouse keeper wound a 1200 pound weight by hand every 30 minutes to revolve the lighthouse lens. The lantern itself was originally kerosene. In 1964 electrical equipment was installed, and today the whole lighthouse process works automatically: computers maintain the light, and the APC equipment and a diesel generator make sure it keeps shining even during terrible storms that bring power outages. Which is pretty important given that 39 ships were wrecked off the Western end of Bermuda in the decade before the lighthouse was constructed. Now that’s a mission-critical data center!

Additionally the lighthouse stands on a hill that is 245 feet, and the lighthouse itself is 117 feet tall, which is why it can be seen from 40 miles away. And I can personally attest to the fact that most of Bermuda can be seen from the top of the lighthouse. Gibbs Lighthouse – where data center truly meets the cloud.

My view from top, facing west

If cloud is the answer, what is the question?

Every year in our IT industry we enthusiastically embrace a different buzzword as the panacea of IT. Recall grid, virtualization and ILM – all laudable technologies that solve IT problems, but not fitting the definition of panacea. This year the buzzword seems to be cloud.

I’m an ardent fan of technological innovation – without it we’re missing one of the most important ways to truly change the world in which we live. And I believe cloud is game-changing technology. Being a true geek, I’m genuinely excited about the potential cloud offers in changing the IT landscape dramatically: if done right it doesn’t matter how compute, network, and storage interact inside a cloud… leaving broad room for innovation that would be considered too disruptive in today’s datacenter… paving the way for a new generation of applications that will solve problems many of us haven’t even thought of yet.

Yet cloud is no panacea. It takes hard work to solve IT problems: scale, security, compliance, data portability, privacy and so on. In addition the use of cloud requires changes to IT process and organization, with risk around every corner. But there’s reward in embracing clouds – reward in using IT to enable businesses to enter new markets more quickly, using cloud to reduce IT costs through economies of scale, and in changing those age-old financial conversations around capital and expense.

But it takes expertise, experience, and insight to figure out how to apply cloud technologies to meet the IT challenges of today and tomorrow. Which is why our Professional Services team, who have been working with customers to make their IT environments as efficient as possible, will also help customers figure out where cloud fits in their IT roadmaps. It’s a perfect match – PS experts who understand where cloud technology is going and who work every day to build efficient datacenters, helping to determine where cloud fits in customer’s IT roadmaps.

So if the question is “How do I get the most efficient IT environment to run and grow my business – both today and tomorrow?”, our PS experts can help determine where cloud fits in the answer – for both today and tomorrow.

Smiling Communities

Next Monday we are sponsoring our CommunityOne West event, where developers, technologists and students come together to share experiences about open platforms, tools and services. The day is stuffed with over 70 technical sessions, over 40 lightning talks and some hands-on labs. Cloud, web, social media, mobile, operating systems and platforms, and more. And after all that, there are some rocking parties in the evening to light up everyone’s smiles – like the one last year where I tried hitting a piñata blindfolded.

But an event does not make a community – Monday is not the beginning or the end of this technical community. CommunityOne simply provides a time and place for community members to meet and strengthen the work they do together all year round. The work that goes on in community forums on-line (like Sun Developer Network), in local events (like Sun Tech Days), and in the many blogs, tweets, skype-facilitated meetings, and so on and so on, round-the-world, round-the-clock, year-in and year-out.

This past weekend I had the privilege to join a different community at their annual event: the AngelRide. Where over 400 riders and volunteers come together with a common goal: to fund a hospital outreach program that brings joy into the lives of children with cancer. The outreach program is an extension of the Hole in The Wall Gang Camps – a wonderful set of camps around the country for youngsters with cancer to have some fun, to find some peace, and to feed the spirit they need to face their cancer battles. What I found this weekend was a strong, loving, and dedicated community of people who work year round to ensure the AngelRide logistics are seamless, to offer a web site and pictures community members can use to communicate their mission, to sweat and train hard so that the 135 miles of Connecticut hills don’t look so impossibly daunting, to deliver to the ultimate goal – raising the most money to makes the kids lives easier.

While this past weekend’s AngelRide was a beautiful event, the true beauty could be found in the smiles on the Angel rider’s and volunteer’s faces… Because the community once again raised funds for an outreach program that puts smiles on kids faces… And that’s over 14000 kids the AngelRide has smiled upon so far.

The 5W’s of Remote Operations Management

The 5W’s is an old formula that works for journalists, law enforcement and researchers in getting to the “full story”. This week I’m at Gartner’s outsourcing summit in Vegas talking with lots of people about Sun’s Remote Operations Management (ROM) service. And I’m finding the 5W’s works quite well for ROM as well, if I take them in my own order: Why? Who? Where? What? When?

Why is ROM a good option for IT right now? We all know the world today is always on, has an insatiable appetite for information, and expects service at it’s fingertips. And this means IT shops are under more pressure than ever – pressure to focus on strategic initiatives to grow business while shrinking IT costs at the same time. How do you free up IT for new projects when 70-80% of the IT budgets and the majority of IT staff are taking care of legacy infrastructure? Remote Operations Management for efficient processes and variable financing models.

Who should customers turn to for help? Certified ROM experts with expert tools. You want a vendor with years of experience, with technical and IT service management (e.g.; ITIL) certifications, with a knowledge base built from experience. You don’t want to be the first customer of an inexperienced remote management vendor.

Where does your remote operations vendor need to be? Everywhere – a ROM vendor needs to have global, local, and ubiquitous presence. So many businesses have global or multinational needs – your ROM vendor must have multiple Network Operation Centers (NOCs) in multiple locations – able to serve round the globe and round the clock. And service is a people business – you need local language support and local law compliance – so your ROM vendor must have a local presence as well. And transparency is a must – meaning you as a ROM customer must have ubiquitous access to see how your ROM vendor is doing – make sure you have portal access to see your environment from anywhere.

What should you turn over to a ROM vendor? Anyone in IT knows that the outsourcing model of the early 2000’s – where IT turned over the keys to the entire datacenter to outsourcing vendors – just didn’t work. It left IT with little control over their own destiny, with little ability to align with changing business needs. A much better strategy is selective sourcing – “a strategy that treats IT as a portfolio of activities, some of which should be outsourced and others of which should be performed by internal staff. In other words, decide what’s critical to differentiate and manage it internally; decide what’s becoming commodity IT and look to selectively source it”.

When will a vendor help you with your selective sourcing? Certainly it needs to be on your terms – do you need interim management to help through a spike in your IT needs? Are you building a new application and want someone else to manage the infrastructure? Do you need someone to take over some of your legacy environment – to help increase availability and scale? A true selective sourcing vendor will take on any of these circumstances – dictated by your needs not by their demands.

Quite often the 5W’s are accompanied by 1H. Once you get the 5W’s out of the way in your analysis of remote operations management services, the How moves to front and center. So How? Just take a look at how Sun Remote Operations Management has answered these questions for other customers. And then let our ROM team lead the way.

Feeling green today

I’m not green around the gills or even green with envy. I’m feeling Eco-Green!

Today Sun was named to the Uptime Institute’s Global Green 100 list. For three great green reasons:

• We focus on building server, storage and software products that are sustainable. Some of my favorites are the new
  Open Network Systems announced earlier this week (using the killer Intel Nehalem processor at 30% less power for compute, and integrated flash at 38% less power/GB) and of course the virtualization built right into Solaris and OpenSolaris. Cuz we all know that most servers are drastically underutilized – like maybe by 85% – meaning lots of the power they consume and heat they put off is a complete waste. I’m also a fan of virtualized desktops – although the SunRay in my office throws off so little heat I have to wear gloves to keep my hands warm.
• We’ve consolidated our Sun datacenters into eco-friendly environments, using next-gen power and cooling systems – saving 60% in power load. It took a lot of ingenuity to build those new datacenters – ingenuity fueled by the innovative minds at Sun.
• And we’ve built professional services expertise around that innovation. So now we’re building eco-friendly datacenters for our customers – helping them to be as green as we are.

Which means next year I expect to see our customer names on the Global Green 100 list too.

Luck O’ The Irish to You

I mean Luck Oapostrophe The Irish to you. I’ve been struggling for years with the special character in my surname name O’Connor. The apostrophe, which originally took the form Ó, indicates that my father is the grandson of Connor. But many computer systems cannot handle the apostrophe because they view it as a string delimiter, and therefore get confused when it shows up in a name.

Cycle way back to my first computer assignment: write a program to read in a string containing your name and print it back out. Anyone who’s ever taken a CS course knows this one. However, long after our classmates had left for Teds, only my good friend Scott O’Brien and I were left struggling in UConn’s basement computer center. Yup, we were suffering from the dreaded apostrophe syndrome while the Smiths, the Jones, and even the McCabes were off drinking beer.

And I ran into the same problem recently while I was booking a flight on the Aer Lingus website – check this out:

Like the mantra of eradicating short date formats back in the yesteryear of Y2K, can’t we Irish computer geeks band together to make the apostrophe a first class citizen? Eradicate the lazy string delimiter checking…

Well that’s my wish for the day. Now this Irish geek is off to find some good green beer. Signed, Amy OapostropheConnor

When I was a kid… [or before OpenSolaris 2008.11]

Ya know how we always lament how hard we had to work in the past, kinda implying how much more it made us appreciate life? From the age-old “when I was a kid I had to walk uphill to school, both ways…” to the line my husband tried on our kids “we didn’t have remote controls when we were growing up. We had to get up to change the channel”. Well, developers and sysadmins alike, here’s my lament: “back in the day I had to write my own device drivers in order to really use Solaris”.

Well, no more laments. Today we officially launched OpenSolaris 2008.11. And while it’s always been a great operating system for all the hard stuff – like scalability, diagnosability, reliability, it’s now really easy to use on your desktop because of all the hardware compatibility features and new applications built right in. So you don’t have to worry about finding network device drivers, and media applications. You can just get right down to business – using OpenSolaris to build applications that will grow your business.

And when OpenSolaris is deployed in production, we’re happy to provide the support. Here’s a quote I love from one of our OpenSolaris customers “The level of enterprise customer service support that comes with Sun is exponentially better than what you get with other open source products and solutions. When you compare Sun with vendors such as Red Hat or Novell in the platform space, the difference is like night and day.” Need I say anymore?

When expertise is important…

When I picked up my four Thanksgiving pies at Stonybrook Farm this afternoon, the baker mentioned that he made 500 pies for the holiday. I trust his expertise much better than my own, admittedly poor, pie-making skills.

Which brings me to our announcement yesterday. Keeping data for long periods of time is important these days. Of equal importance is truly destroying data as required by internal corporate erasure or regulatory policy. That’s why we developed a new on-site service to help customers with this challenge. Our experts delivering the new Sun Data Protection Data Erasure service will work with customers to ensure their erasure policies are compliant.

Now back to Thanksgiving: tomorrow we will give thanks for our baker’s pie-making expertise while we erase those four pies.

Analyze this!

Yesterday I presented at the Sun Analyst Series (SAS) with Peter Ryan (Sun’s EVP of Global Sales and Services), Ingrid Van Den Hoogen (Sun’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing) and Dave Douglas (Senior V.P. of Network.com and now leading Cloud Computing and Developer Programs, and Sun’s Chief Sustainability Officer – I really believe he has the longest title at Sun).

It was a good day. We talked with industry analysts about Sun’s strategy for growth (software infrastructure, HPC, enterprise virtualization and consolidation, developer community growth and cloud computing), our new business groups (System Platforms, Application Platform Software, and Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms), and changes within marketing (product and technology marketing are now fully embedded directly into the product groups). Ingrid outlined the changes at Sun and how they’ll help us moving forward. Peter talked about how Sun’s innovations continue to set us apart (and ahead) of other companies. Dave gave a glimpse of cloud computing at Sun and I spoke about all the great things we do in Sun Services – oh, can I mention again that we have a great remote operations management business? As I said, it was a good day. We had a lot of good conversations. Answered a lot of good questions.

It was an even better dinner. You have to analyze the analysts a bit too – our crew at dinner was really interesting. We swapped stories all around and had a great time. The overall mode was really positive. If only the economy would agree.

Of Classic Cars and Vintage Support

In a way that surprises me, I love my Mini Cooper. I’ve become a car enthusiast as I never imagined possible. My attachment to my car borders on the downright giddy. I love all things Mini Cooper and even went to a Mini Driving Academy. I’m fairly new to Mini Mania but I’ve seen my future in Classic Mini owners. At Mini Meet-ups the classic owners talk a lot about maintenance – where to get classic engine parts, where the best, most knowledgeable mechanics can be found, who to trust with your paint job.

At Sun we have a classic community too – our Solaris 8 users. They like what they have and want to stay at that rev. Our classic community doesn’t need to worry about maintenance or search for experts; Sun Services provides them Solaris 8 Vintage Patch Service. Vintage Patch Service can take two forms: straight-up Solaris 8 environment Vintage Patch support or Solaris 8 Containers run on a Solaris 10 machine with Vintage Patch support. Either way Vintage Patch support keeps our Solaris 8 users up and running smoothly.

And should our classic Solaris 8 users decide to move to Solaris 10, Sun Professional Services is ready with migration support to plan, test and implement their upgrade.

My All-Avatar Meeting

How do you get your team together when they’re scattered all over the globe? Well, I hosted my first all-hands meeting in Second Life yesterday and it was awesome to see people from Germany, Singapore, London, France, Sweden, Canada, Colorado, California, and Massachusetts – to name a few – coming together, across time zones and continents, to share thoughts and ideas.

What a time to be in marketing – the transformation from traditional media to social media is changing how we interact with each other, our partners, and our customers. While there’s still lots to figure out about how to use social media effectively to get Sun’s message out through communities, we were privileged to have MaryMary (Sun’s Mary Smaragdis) to help lead our discussion. Mary talked about the exponential growth of the various Social Media communities and, most interestingly, she explained the powerful impact of individual conversations in this new social ecosystem. One short blog entry, one twitter, one facebook update can add to a cadence to create a ripple effect. These individual bloggers start and sway conversations within the tech-influencer community.

It was great to see everyone hang out after the all-hands to mingle – I particularly enjoyed the many conversations about avatar hairdos (“Are you the one with the green hair?” “I have more hair here than in the real-world”). And I’ll admit – I love that my avatar never has a bad hair day.

The ABCs of Services

Need some OPA or PDQ anyone? A bit of SBL, a nip of RTPH? About a month ago I started a new job in Services Marketing, and while it’s been great meeting new people and learning all about our services offerings at Sun, I have to admit the acronyms are overwhelming. Funny thing… when I ask what they stand for – except for our sales team who knew every last one they used – 47.3% of the time no one could remember what the acronym meant (OK, I made up that statistic, but haven’t you heard that 47.3% of all statistics are made up?).

So now I know the CSEs are working on JESH in the NOC, which follows ITIL, and the SMGFS helps our customers with these CATK services.

I realigned those acronyms, and after removing duplicate letters, here’s what I came up with: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST. Seems we’re weak near the end of the alphabet. But I think I can say, it’s no longer all geek to me.

Now, as to what’s going on in services, we launched OpenSolaris this month at CommunityOne (a fabulous event – it you didn’t get there this year, plan on it for May09. FYI, the UnBOFs were outrageously fun! Interesting henna tattoos) and we also announced enterprise support for OpenSolaris. Customers wanting to run OpenSolaris as their OS of choice now have several options for support from Sun. For support coverage, they can purchase one of two new offerings – OpenSolaris Essentials or OpenSolaris Production Subscriptions. In addition, they can receive support coverage under their existing Sun System Service Plans for Solaris, and limited coverage under their existing Solaris Subscriptions. Developers can receive support through Developer Expert Assistance.

Open doesn’t have to mean alone. Product and service: that’s the right combination.

My SecondLife: AmyO Later

Yesterday Sun sponsored an employee event in-world. I’ll admit I was a skeptic, but sitting in a virtual theater with co-worker avatars is MUCH better than listening to a meeting on a phone. I hung out with friends from all sorts of real-life locales, and was able to fidget and change seats throughout the day. The talks were all great – with a focus on Sun strategy and interesting speakers from across the company.

Ya know how companies typically sponsor parties at the end of a long event? Last night I teleported into Club Java, where I was promptly animated into a great dancer by our Second Life staffers. I’m the redhead on the right, Doreen is in the middle and Lizzi is dancing up a storm in the back.

Who said I couldn’t dance?

Signed, AmyO… Later

New Business Models: Red Sox and Open Source

How do you expand your business beyond existing customers and traditional revenue opportunities? Take the Red Sox for example. Fenway Park seats just under 40,000 fans and the Red Sox have sold out every home game since May 2003. But with the highest ticket prices in the majors, there’s just no room for price uplift to help revenue. So the Sox launched a number of businesses that leverage their baseball success into other areas: services like FanFoto, added value product like post-game concerts that in turn sell more food and merchandise, consulting to businesses that want to market through sports, online ads, and travel packages with the team to away-game destinations.

All around us new business models are maximizing economic value. I often get asked why we open source our software at Sun, and how we can possibly make money doing that. Well, developers that use our software platforms (e.g.; OpenSolaris, Java, NetBeans, MySQL) can innovate in their applications without worrying about the scalability, reliability, and flexibility of the underlying platform. And open sourcing those platforms expands our reach to developers who don’t have the funds to pay steep software licenses.

The number of people using our software increases each and every day. But we all learned at a young age that zero times a large number is still zero, so how do we make money when we give away our core software intellectual property?

Our business model today delivers support and managed services, added value products, servers, storage and consulting to empower open source deployers as they grow their businesses at Web scale. Value-added businesses that surround and enhance the open source experience. Ya know, not all that different from what the Red Sox are doing with their Fenway Sports Group business.

Mini Me

At Sun we’re all about “The Network is the Computer”, which really means instant access to information, anytime, anywhere. And the pace at work continues to speed up as development happens more and more rapidly on the Internet. Each and every day it’s a pace that races in the fast lane. A good friend recently articulated his strategy for maintaining a balance to our overdrive work environment: “work hard play hard”. Well said. To that end I matched my work pace while at play this past weekend – under the tutelage of Phil Wicks (he stunt drove the red Mini in the original Italian Job). That’s me driving my yellow Mini…

Mini Madness

I had a mini vacation in Vegas this weekend – took my sweet yellow Mini Cooper to meet its community. Met a yellow twin and lots of minis making personalized statements. Even a mini-meetup at the

Top o’ the Morning

It was a good Saint Patrick’s celebration: del.icio.us corned beef and cabbage, ice cold beer and a LOUD Dropkick Murphys concert. My first exposure to the Dropkick Murphys was this past baseball season when they performed at Fenway Park before Game 7 of the ALCS, and then again on a flatbed truck in the Red Sox rolling rally, with Jonathan Papelbon strumming along on his broomstick guitar.

The Dropkick Murphys have really fostered their community: they’re on MySpace, all over the blogosphere and they host their own fan community on their website.

And community is what it’s all about these days. Communities of all types and kinds, each with a purpose, but all about sharing their common interests. Take OpenSolaris for instance. According to wikipedia “OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around Solaris Operating System technology. It is aimed at developers, system administrators and users who want to develop and improve operating systems.”

Given the security focus in Solaris, it’s no wonder the U.S. National Security Agency announced this past week that they are joining the OpenSolaris community to collaborate on new security mechanisms for operating system.

The cool thing about communities is members can chose the level to which they want to participate. The luck of the Irish was with me on Saturday – before I left for the concert, my teenage daughter warned me that moshing is big in the Dropkick Murphy community. So I chose to enjoy the celtic punk tunes from the venue’s balcony – and in case you haven’t seen moshing, there’s a great YouTube video on it that totally had me rolling on the floor with laughter. Slainte!

What a Hoot!

Open source is a way for all of us to get better at listening. Instead of large companies imposing closed solutions on the market; customers, individual developers and partners can all take part in conversations that lead to the next best thingamabob. By listening and sharing we stand to build better solutions. One example of this is in the development of industry standards. Quite a few years ago I was Sun’s representative on a standards association. Members met every six weeks to push the particular spec we were working. The process was excruciating – lots more talking than listening. At a point theoretically near the end of spec definition, we vendors would start our own implementations, only to have to go back and negotiate changes in the spec that just didn’t work in implementation.

Now take the example of NFSv4.1 – the latest version of the NFS spec being worked in the IETF. In opensolaris.org you can find an NFSv4.1 client that anyone (yup, anyone from any company) can use to help get their NFSv4.1 server implementation going. Which helps advance what shows up at Bakeathons and Connectathons. Which helps advance the spec more quickly. Which should help get better solutions into customers hands earlier. All enabled by an open source community of developers listening to each other in order to get to a common goal.

On a slightly different note, check out this pic of a baby owl nesting at our Sun Broomfield campus. Thanks to my pal Steve G for letting me know I was walking past some shrubbery where the little one hangs out. And mucho thanks to the guy in Building 6 who pointed to mama owl eyeing me from up above as I quickly snapped the picture… I got away with my head intact. Remember the wise old owl poem? “A wise old owl lived in an oak. The more he saw the less he spoke. The less he spoke the more he heard. Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?”

Aussie Floyd, Football, and CIFS

After enjoying an incredible Aussie Floyd concert in New Hampshire on Friday, the next day I joined my friends in Connecticut for another round… The Wall, Dark Side of the Moon, an awesome rendition of The Great Gig in the Sky, flying pigs and so much more. But I digress – while there I picked up the newspaper, and on the front page was an article about my high school football team – the friday night lights of Connecticut with fifteen state championships in thirty years. A little further into the paper was talk about my college alma mater’s football team working hard for an undefeated record this year. And on Sunday I watched the Patriots sweat to keep their unbeaten record. All three teams have taken years to build their programs, and all three teams work hard day in and day out to be their best.

Hard work and sweat, day after day, year after year. Even the Aussie Floyders. I can’t imagine the stamina it takes to put on a show like that, and the energy it requires to move and reassemble all that equipment night after night, state after state, concert after concert. And as a rabid fan all around, I’ve always appreciated the hard work put in by my teams and bands. Truly, with two amazing concerts and three (almost) undefeated football teams – it was a really enjoyable weekend enabled by a lot of hard work behind the scenes.

Yesterday morning I ran into my pal Joe on the way into the office. Joe led the team that integrated our CIFS server into OpenSolaris, which is very cool because it makes OpenSolaris even more interoperable in Windows environments. This also means the open source world has the tools to build storage arrays and systems, and innovative new solutions for data management problems. And it didn’t come easy – Joe’s team has been working on this for a long, long time and by the look in his eye I could tell there were some weekends when they didn’t get to the concerts and football games.

Yup, I really enjoy good music, good football and good software. But it’s the hard work behind the scenes that makes it all worthwhile.

Open source and your old TV

A while back I saved a page torn from a JDJ issue
cuz I was amused by the quote: “When a company has a dead-end product, it gives it away to the open source community. The only difference between that and putting your old TV out on the street is people take their TV out of the house quietly, while the software vendors make a loud noise about their donations.” In other words, if you give something away for free, it mustn’t be worth bragging about..

Now’s my time to brag. My daughter’s friends recently found an old TV for their college apartment. In exchange for some development on the TV repairman’s web site, their old TV is now broadcasting Red Sox games in high def to a very appreciative, and broke, college crowd. A resourceful crowd that somehow managed to scrape up the $ for cable service.

What these enterprising young college students did was take something offered for free, and tune it up in a way that fit with their economic model – or rather – their meager wallets. And the cable company benefits. A lot like what happens with the many developers out there joining open source communities. They take the software for free, use it, change it to fit their needs, give something back to the community, and then think about paying for commercial service to enhance their free experience.

Earlier this week IBM announced they are joining the OpenOffice.org community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software… to help expand the use of the Open Document Format (ODF)… to donate accessibility features from their work on Lotus Notes.

Seems like this is a good thing for consumers. Definitely worth all the noise.

I’m Blogging This…

One of my favorite people gave me the I’m Blogging This t-shirt recently, and I’ve had some great fun wearing it around. O’Reilly is right that “it’s unlikely that you’ll actually see anyone overtly change their behavior lest they be blogged, but you’ll certainly shake up a paranoid few.”

The most paranoid reaction I got was from the poor hotel clerk who was helping me to get wireless working in my hotel room. I didn’t figure out until later that he probably thought I would blog about a bad Internet connection – maybe I couldn’t even post my blog because of it? I’m not a rampant consumer blogger though, and I’ll confess now that I had inadvertently hit the wireless switch on the side of my laptop, so it wasn’t even the hotel’s fault that I couldn’t connect.

It was interesting to see who commented when I wore the t-shirt while working at our Menlo Park campus: one IDC analyst, our analyst relations lead, an incredibly nice Sun communications manager (she introduced herself and exclaimed “what a great shirt” as I passed her in the courtyard), a Sun executive who really likes black t-shirts, and my product marketing buddy who really likes black shoes…

Brad Pitt & George Clooney: Tape is not Dead

When I was at the movies last week watching Ocean’s Thirteen, it dawned on me that our SL8500 tape library got closer to Brad Pitt and George Clooney than I ever will. As Nigel mentioned, we lent one of these beauties to Ocean’s Thirteen for the ‘Bank Casino Operations Center’. So yeah, tape is not dead. Tape is alive, well, and hanging out with the likes of George/Danny Ocean and Brad/Rusty Ryan.

But I wonder if George and Brad know just how awesome the SL8500 actually is. Do they know, for example, an SL8500 can hold a petabyte of data – about two hundred thousand copies of their Oceans Thirteen movie? Do they know that if the Bank Casino used 1000 cameras to gather their surveillance data and stored that data for 30 days, they would fill the tapes in an SL8500? And in interests of saving the planet, do they know tape is about 25 times less expensive to power and cool than disk because it uses that much less energy? All great news for the IT budget and the planet.

I spent some time this week with our Media and Entertainment sales team – to say the data in M&E is exploding is a complete understatement. One customer digitizing TV shows is expecting to have 50 petabytes of metadata to enable all the searches they need to handle – never mind the raw entertainment itself! And the M&E industry is heading full steam ahead into complete digitization, consumer mashups, affiliate communities… Data, data, and more data. No wonder why many cool web sites are using SL8500s to help store that data.

So, sure Brad and George were cast for the Ocean’s movies because they’re so hip, but our SL8500 certainly fit right in with the Ocean gang on their latest caper.

Storage, with a Twist

A few basic, quality ingredients. A splash of color and flavor tuned to satisfy a particular consumer’s needs. Why do martinis make me think of storage? Until the last two decades, martinis consisted of a good gin with a whisper of vermouth. But the 90s brought the vodka craze and sometime in the early part of this millenium, creative people figured out they had good basic ingredients that could easily be adjusted from crisp, to sour, to sweet with the addition of some straightforward flavorings. And that brought an expanded consumer base.

We’ve discovered the same thing about storage systems. A few years ago you could get storage in just a couple flavors – the original block devices or file storage that came on the scene in the 1990s. Both had just a few data services floating around the bottom like olives for additional flavor. But now that the world is starting to build storage systems using standard server technology and general purpose operating systems, more and more flavors of storage are seeing the light of day. Flavors dictated by the problem facing the customer, not by the layout of data on some physical media. Flavors formed by the application dealing with the customer problem, not by speeds and feeds.

This week a team of specialists in the UK tackled a big problem faced by our European telco customers – the controversial EU Data Retention Directive with a new Secure Data Retrieval Server that leverages an X4500 server, Solaris 10 operating system, and some partner software build purposely to solve this type of problem. The UK team didn’t have to spend years negotiating a product spec with large engineering teams – our engineering teams and our partner community had already empowered them with the ingredients to build a compliance solution specific to the needs of those European businesses dealing with the new EU legislation.

Someone asked me today if the announcement of the Secure Data Retrieval Server means we’re no longer committed to Honeycomb. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fact is, our coffers are full of ingredients, and while our Honeycomb team is working hard with customers and ISVs in healthcare and digital libraries, our team closest to the problems facing European telcos found the combination of the X4500, Solaris, and CopperEye created a great solution.

Because when a vendor has the right ingredients, customers have choice.