• Business,  Unix

    Days of our Oracle: Sun

    McNealy no longer has an executives page on Oracle.com. He also sent To be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company. In other words, for 7.4 Billion dollars, you win (not that I’d blame him too much). Then Jonathan Schwartz sent a letter to Sun employees that ended: So thank you, again, for the privilege and honor of working together. The internet’s made the world a far smaller place–so I’m sure we’ll be bumping into one another. That sounds like…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    OpenSolaris 2009.06 First Impressions

    OpenSolaris 2009.06 is the next generation of the OpenSolaris, the Open Source Solaris that has become the testing ground for new features bound for Sun’s popular Solaris Operating System.  The latest version of OpenSolaris sports a number of new features that environments both large and small are sure to find interesting, most of which have to do with more streamlined ways of managing disk, network and other resources – both in virtualization environments and with the operating system itself. First up is package management (using the tool appropriately called Package Manager).  It’s now easier to install software managed/compiled by the OpenSolaris community.  The packaging environment for OpenSolaris can now access…

  • Business

    Iron Wars

    Occasionally I say that everything I need to know I learned from the game Civilization (partially in jest). In Civilization, you need to amass a certain amount of resources in order to build things in your various cities (and generate armies). Iron is something you can use to build a number of things. There are other resources you need to be concerned about, of course… In modern times, in order to be able to sell iron, you need a compelling reason for people to buy it – and corporate wars ensue to end competition to this end. One really great reason is the best threading model on the market; another…

  • Uncategorized

    IBM to Buy Sun?

    I’ve been saying for some time that something is going to happen with Sun.  They’re too awesome to wallow in mediocrity.  Now, IBM might be buying Sun for $6.5 Billion.  Sun shares are up (drastically), IBM shares down.  This merger is hard to imagine.  To me, Sun is a great company that is like a boat without a rudder.  They are entrenched in the open source movement, with their purchase of MySQL, but have not shown that they can reconcile other corporate cultures into their own.  It’s hard to imagine that things will be different with integrating their own corporate culture into that of IBM.   But Sun has a vast…

  • Business,  Consulting

    Tech Predictions Rant

    <rant> According to Mayan tradition if you jump into one of the cenotes by the Mayan pyramids you can make predictions as to the future. Apparently, one person predicted he would be a ruler and was thus anointed such. Funny how that works. Well, I cave dived into a cenote and then read the January editions of eWeek, ComputerWorld, NetworkWorld, CIO and about 10 other magazines that show up to my house despite the lack of funding on my part for them to do so. Let’s see if I can wade through the fluff… First off, January is a funny month for tech magazines as it’s all IT predications, “look…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix,  Xsan

    Sun's OpenStorage

    OpenSolaris + Open Storage + ZFS = Open Source storage.  Not that you can’t just pay Sun for an appliance if that’s what you’re after.  They have the OpenStorage 7000, but really isn’t it fun to build up your own? If that’s what you’re after Sun has the Open Storage Community page. Using Open Storage you can go far beyond using Time Machine with an Open Solaris NAS. You can build your own truly enterprise class storage system and connect to it from pretty much any operating system. However, it’s not an appliance. Support isn’t necessarily going to be end=to-end if you BTO your own gear, rolling your own SAN.…

  • Unix

    Making the case for Solaris

    I recently read an article that Solaris is a dead OS (or will be rather shortly).  I beg to differ, proveded the hardware support is there.  Solaris can still multithread better than anyone.  Solaris’ ZFS is still the most superior file system available (although before the ReiserFS founder got put in prison for wasting his wife it looked poised for greatness) and the Sun hardware is still best of breed.  Sun as a company is also going to be building tighter integration into MySQL, which should help boost numbers.   But the pony-tail-laden chief of Sun definitely has his work cut out for him.  There are certain acquisitions that have…