ncchat05 (Q): What is your reaction to Merryl-Lynch's recommendation that Sun purchase Novell or Redhat to show their adoption to the Linux market? A: We don't comment on such things as a matter of policy. groenveld (Q): A quick glance of redhat.com and novell.com suggests that a Solaris support contract is cheaper than your competitors' Linux support options. Are there any surveys which show whether your customers are more satisfied? John groenveld@acm.org Glenn Weinberg (A): I don't know of any surveys but I've heard that anecdotally. octave (Q): What do you see as the key driver for customer to move away from EMC storage to the 6920 platform? Jason Schaffer (A): Even though the SE6920 is a superior storage system, and can dramatically reduce the cost and complexity inherent in todays heterogeneous data center environments, Sun customers are most likely to move to the SE6920 because of the unique ?open? flexibility it offers. For example, with the SE6920 Sun customers are not required to make major, disruptive, moves from one storage platform to another every few years. With the SE6920, Sun customers can incorporate existing storage arrays from any vendor (even EMC) in a broad-reaching tiered storage solution. herb (Q): we have in our school sun-solaris running and are very happy with it. Unfortunatelly there is only few educational software for it, most is windows-based. Where can I get educationprogramms running on solaris (in German language)? Glenn Weinberg (A): Tarantella should help with this by allowing Windows and Solaris applications to run on the same physical system and display in Solaris. RichTeer (Q): Talking of the V100, do you have any plans for a sub- $1000 x86-based server and/or desktop? Glenn Weinberg (A): Watch this space. groenveld (Q): The Aopen DVD drive in Metropolis workstations requires a prom update but the OEM only provides it for Win32. Is a solution in the works, perhaps similar to Joerg Schilling's Solaris pxupdate tool for Plextor drives? John groenveld@acm.org Glenn Weinberg (A): Many firmware update tools are available as standalone products which should work on all Sun x86/x64 systems since they use standard BIOSes. Nevertheless we will do all we can to make OS-based tools available for Solaris. OpenSolaris should help in this regard. octave (Q): Would Sun consider designing a new management tool for Solaris? Sun management console has not been update in a long time. For experienced sysadmins, this is a non-issue. But for smaller shops and new customers this doesn't cut it today. Glenn Weinberg (A): I have an entire team dedicated to what we call Solaris approachability. That includes ease of management. We're not prepared to discuss specifics of particular tools at this time, but recognize the issue and are actively addressing it. octave (Q): As for converting Xsun to Xorg, will the same framebuffers be supported? Will my Elite3d card still work? Glenn Weinberg (A): We will do our best to support the broadest possible set of devices with the Xorg server, but I don't have a specific answer for Elite3d at this time. topbannana (Q): Jamal, so is SAP helping Sun support this solution; SAP has its own portal product which provides user/identity management, so why would they do that? Jamal Houmaoui (A): The solution is a sevices based one. Assessment, feasibility, implementation and deployment. The technology components are based on the Sun Java ES software stack. The policy agent that was developed for SAP EP6 could be installed on all the servers where the SAP EP6 installation resides and captures all requests incoming to the portal and checks for valid single sign-on cookies. On the first attempt to access the portal the user will not have any authentication and will be transparently redirected to the Access Manager, which will check his/her login credentials. If the user has valid crendentials, he/she will be granted access to the SAP EP6 without having to verify his userid and password a second time. bill (Q): Example problem -- If I have a client that wants a low end system, I am forced to buy a Dell(or other) box and add Solaris 10. I am talking less than $1k for a deskside low end server. It is then very hard to turn the customer from Dell to a better Sun upgrade solution. A low low end Sun deskside server would sure help. Even changing options on the Sun workstations to configure it as a server would help some. Performance isn't the issue, initial cost is. Just my two cents. Chris Ratcliffe (A): We have very price-competitive systems today on both SPARC and x64. Watch for additional product announcements coming soon. swa (Q): What, if any, is your relationship with Gentoo? Glenn Weinberg (A): I believe Gentoo has announced their intent to work with OpenSolaris, but am not aware of any formal relationship beyond that. gentimjs (Q): how is the speed on solaris 10's linux binary support? one of our thermal engineers dual boots linux (from windows) on his opteron because it shaves -days- off his work to run the linux port of his number crunching app vs the windows port.. would we typically see simmilar (to linux) performance running on solaris 10? Chris Ratcliffe (A): In our internal testing we were surprised to see some EDA applications compiled for RHEL run faster on Solaris 10. It is application dependent and your mileage may vary. sharif (Q): HP has HP OpenViewsoftware is there any thing in SUN which has more or same functionality Andy Tucker (A): Sun has strong relations with numerous vendors providing Systems & Networking Monitoring (SNM) functionality, including HP Openview itself. We provide best of breed services that assess customer requirements and help guide them to the products that best meet their needs. See the OMS release at http://www.sun.com/executives/iforce/integratedsolutions/oms/ for information on some of these services. Antnee (Q): SunRay is generating a lot of questions today. Do you find that this is a pattern in other areas, ie do a lot more customers seem interested in what is clearly an excellent technology? Glenn Weinberg (A): Sun has always been a technology-driven company and so we most often attract customer interest through our technology and innovation. topbannana (Q): :-) Glenn, I'll beat you to it next time ... Glenn Weinberg (A): I always like a friendly competition :-) octave (Q): Has there been an interest in porting OpenSOlaris to other platforms than Sparc and x86? Mike and Tim (A): Yes, PowerPC is a very active thread in the opensolaris pilot community. Nabarun Mazumder (Q): Sun Certification is very popular now a days ..do u have any special plans for Sun Solaris certification Otto Wright (A): Yes, we currently already offer Solaris certification hockleyd (Q): Does Sun have any guidelines or whitepapers for independent developers that cover development guidelins to make an application "grid-friendly" or more effective on a grid service? Bjorn Andersson (A): Yes, we can provide support for developing network computing applications, i.e. Grid friendly applications. We have white papers etc and also support for ISV's through our market development organization. PJK (Q): Is N1Grid likely to bail out Sun? Jim Parkinson (A): SunGrid will be a great service for our customers! We think it will be positive for the our customers and our business. It is a key part of Sun offerings to our customers. JohnGalt (Q): Do you forsee SUN buying or merging with AMD to compete against INTEL headon in x86 market. Glenn Weinberg (A): We are very happy with our partnership with AMD and believe it is enabling both companies to compete very effectively in the marketplace. Charly (Q): Are Sun managing Scholar' teachers Training?? Otto Wright (A): We do a lot of training for third party products. check out sun.com/training/ for a complete course listing- bud (Q): I need an express doc to get express configure solaris 10 containers, dtrace..etc. I cant find one yet. can you point something out? Mike and Tim (A): Containers and DTrace come bundled with Solaris 10. To use DTrace, refer to the Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide on docs.sun.com. To use Containers, you use zonecfg(1M) to configure them and the documentation is also found on the web. You can also check out the zones forum on sun.com/bigadmin. ncchat05 (Q): With ZFS, SVM, and Legato Networker, it seems Sun is not "pushing" Veritas products as you used to, even though they are still offered. Is this perception or reality? Chris Ratcliffe (A): We now offer a broader range of choice at a number of different price points based on customer demand. VERITAS continues to be a great partner. groenveld (Q): The Solaris 10 RTU prohibits open discussion by customers of their own benchmarks w/o permission from Sun. How do customers obtain permission to disclose their benchmarks? John groenveld@acm.org Chris Ratcliffe (A): They ask Sun (i.e. Solaris Marketing). sunith (Q): i saw an announcement a couple of months ago with PwC regarding a Sarbanes solution, can you give me more details? Otto Wright (A): Sun and PwC announced a joint Sarbanes-Oxley offering to provide PwC consulting and delivery services and Sun Identity products to help companies address the SOX compliance mandates. As one of Sun's key Identity Management partners, PwC has considerable business process expertise and delivery skills to help create and automate internal controls. Using the new Sun Identity Auditor solution, companies can reduce the costs and time required for managing the compliance processes. For more information see sun.com/identity topbannana (Q): Glenn - main thing customers need is the facility to fully support deport and import of disksets without cluster framework; will Sun work on this at least, even though ZFS looks like it may be the way forward in the long term? Glenn Weinberg (A): This is supported in Solaris 10. av8tor56 (Q): When will we see more Sun based all-inclusive bundled offerings(servers, software, storage, services) that address specific market verticals? e.g. healthcare, financial services, retail, telecom, etc. Bjorn Andersson (A): We announced the Sun Grid Rack System last week and this is actually along the lines of what you are asking. It's a flexible way to deliver systems integrated in racks, including software, storage, etc. This is a good base for solutions that address vertical needs and we often partner to provide the final solution to a customer as this usually includes having their applications installed. Many times the delivery mechanism is through our Customer Ready Systems so that the system arives at the customer site with all the hardware integrated and all software pre-loaded. sharif (Q): if i use 12x73gb hdd or 6x146gb hdd which option is better for storedge James Whitmore (A): That is very dependant on the application you are running and the nature of the storage (application support, archival etc). No right or wrong answer. Typically you need a mixture of high performance and low performance drives and that usually means mixed capacities. Moderator: Thank you for joining us today. Our chat will be ending in 10 minutes. Make sure to submit your final questions to our panel of experts. walterg (Q): Do you have a road map for your Storage Products? Jason Schaffer (A): Yes. We will continue to evolve the storage portfolio, helping to ensure that Sun customers always have access to the best storage system technologies. iplanet (Q): Does the acquisition of Tarantella or Procom bring to Sun any sizable net revenue stream? or are they purely technology/marketing acquisitions? Any plans for acquiring new revenue streams in the near future? Judy Depuy (A): The acquisition of these technologies allow us to penetrate large and growing markets. So the plan is to grow revenue. WRT the Procom acquisition, their technology is embedded in key storage products already. Owning the technology allows us to meet customer requirement and develop/integrate these requirements into our products quickly. buggi1000 (Q): Could we expects some new form factor in the Opteron space, like Blades? Is SUN planning or implementing new RAS features? Mike and Tim (A): Sun will be releasing a variety of innovative x86 platforms, and we believe we can offer industry-leading RAS features in the x86 space for these systems through the RAS capabilities of Opteron, our system design, and the Predictive Self-Healing features in Solaris 10. Nabarun (Q): Sir as you told that "Our approach is very different than HP & IBM in that we focus on the process elements (ITIL) and technology (Sun Connection & SevenSpace), instead of masses of consultants." Can u explain it in details??? Hal Stern (A): our goal is to scale our services business using technology. sun connection is the baseline for this, providing a network connection for telemetry and control (remote administration) between sun and its customers. we work with customers on automation, process optimization, and key performance indicator achievement (using a sigma process to create service level agreements); these are all part of our managed services offerings and don't involve 10,000s or 100,000s of consultants; it's a small and scalable delivery unit. we expect to take this to the next level of abstraction with the sun grid utility computing offerings, which aren't about financing or variable leasing but instead focus on deliverying IT as a service over the network. Antnee (Q): Isn't it true that your Opteron based systems are effectively the same as any other PC-style server? Mike Shapiro (A): They are the same in that they run any x86-based OS: Solaris 10, Linux, and Windows. They are unique in that we believe Sun is innovating in system and enclosure design, system density, and in manageability features through the service processor. gentimjs (Q): do you have minimum purchases or simmilar restrictions with the compute/storage grid? if I want to try it out on my own for $30, is that something sun will sell me? Jim Parkinson (A): the pay per use grid will not have a minimum purchase requirement. gentimjs (Q): following up on what Antnee asked about barriers-to- entry for hobbyist users, any plans to sell a reduced cost (even if really low spec) sparc system in the sub-$1000 price range? Chris Ratcliffe (A): You can currently buy SPARC systems for under $1000 (V100 Server), see http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=77644 for more details. JohnGalt (Q): Why doesn't Sun competes hard in the 1CPU/2CPU/4CPU boxes using AMD opteron chips for Small/Mid-Sizes businesses and grab revenue and momentum from DELL. To increase revenue at the low end, SUN will have to let some air out of Dell. Hal Stern (A): it's a question of applications. many small and medium businesses are running applications tied to the windows platform; our hope is that as these companies look at their cost of operations they'll investigate sun grid utility type offerings that remove the management cost/complexity. buggi1000 (Q): Do you expect, that your service revenues could grow much faster than your product revenue? Whats you way in increasing overall margin for SUN? Otto Wright (A): Services revenues will continue to grow in proportion to our product sales at about the same pace, although the mix of services is changing. Services do provide good margins for Sun, but what's more important is that it allows us to keep a healthy long-term relationship with our customers. topbannana (Q): could I make a quick plug? www.blastwave.org is a great opensource place to download 'cool things' for X86 platforms, including different desktops (if people find CDE to clunky or JDS to slow on their present systems) Glenn Weinberg (A): Too late. I already made the plug in one of my answers :-) sharif (Q): Veritas have more functionality than SVM.SUN have any plan with SVM to do it better than veritas Jason Schaffer (A): We continue to evolve SVM. ZFS will bring huge performance, functionality and scale improvements to both file & volume management. And don't forgetthat SVM is free! If there is specific functionality that you are interested in, please let us know. Antnee (Q): I would just like to say before you all disappear that I really think that these chats are fantastic. I wish that other companies could get their staff (and board members) to sit in front of a computer and chat to customers and users like this. Much respect Moderator (A): Thank you so much for the positive feedback. We really appreciate it! mcerveny (Q): Is there any implementation of chain ISP - ADSL - home SunRay terminal (to replace home-pc) ? Jim Parkinson (A): yes we have a implementation running today and also a number of customers have test implementations running also. in most cases they are in addition to the pc/mac in the home. mcerveny (Q): Do you plan to use InfiniBand for inter-processor communication ? Mike and Tim (A): There are certainly some interesting options in this space, but our current plans are to use IB for cluster and grid interconnects. edunokia (Q): Which is your strategy for Linux Market in Brazil? Glenn Weinberg (A): Sun will continue to sell and support standard Linux distributions. In addition we have made Solaris both free and open source, so we hope customers in all markets will consider Solaris as well. topbannana (Q): question for Jamal Houmaoui maybe; within the solutions released, I see a solution around Network Services for SAP. Is Sun working with SAP to develop these solutions? is SAP supporting this solution with Sun? also, will similar services be created around other ISVs such as Siebel? Jamal Houmaoui (A): Sun Network Services for SAP Solutions includes portions of the Sun Java Eenterprise System to provide end-to-end identity management and secure access and services Sun Java Access Manager is integrated with the SAP Enterprise Portal component of SAP NetWeaver through a Sun developed and supplied policy agent. Yes, we are looking into developing similar services for other ISVs. octave (Q): Has Sun thought about working with cable or ISP providers for delivering Sunray desktops to the mass markets? Jim Parkinson (A): yes we are working with number of cable/ISP provider already. gintas (Q): Did I get it right if I say that Sun Connection is an equivalent of RedHat Network? Hal Stern (A): for the update part, sun update connection is the equivalent of the red hat network. but sun connection also supports the collection of telemetry and system data, creating the platform for our preventive services offerings, for example. it's a better comparison to look at sun connection like the GM OnStar network. gintas (Q): What is your involvement in OpenBIOS/FreeBIOS projects? Mike and Tim (A): We're interested in this area, and we want the project to support Sun's platforms, but we have no direct involvement at this time. John (Q): I run microsoft active directory to support windows clients, print and file services - how can sun identity products help me reduce costs etc? John Barco (A): Sun has the ability to provide SSO services for Windows clients, sync passwords with Active Directory, and even provision and manage user accounts in Active Directory and NT domains. Sun's real value is to not only manage Windows clients and applications, but all IT systems including ERP, HR, database, email etc. This heterogeneous support delivers economy of scale which reduces administration and development costs across the board. Mark001 (Q): Since many who would use the utility computing offering need to store large amounts of data during processing, can the Sun storage offering (I think it was 1 gig per month/$1) be tied to the utility computing offering (1 node per hour/$1)? Judy Depuy (A): Customer get a default amount of storage in the $1/cpu/hour. If they need additional storage, they can get obtain it for the $1/GB/month, so yes, the two grid utility offerings are tied together. octave (Q): Will the Niagra or Rock processors require any special cooling technology? Hal Stern (A): one of the design goals for niagara and ROCK has been to address power consumption and heat generation. we are approaching some physical space limitations in these areas; by designing new CPUs that use less power and disperse less heat, we can get higher densities in the data center. we may always choose to use specialized (but self contained) cooling technology; but don't expect to see sun servers with liquid cooling pipes coming out into the floor, if that's your concern! Nabarun (Q): Please tell us more on "Sun Managed Site Infrastructure Services" Is that available in India ?? Otto Wright (A): Absolutely; we have several large customers in India and will continue to grow that part of our business there. Antnee (Q): Why does Sun continue to use CDE? I'm not aware of anyone who actually likes to use it. Personally I find it very 'clunky' and out dated. Unfortunately though, JDS seems very slow on the older hardware so I guess some users have no choice... Hmm, maybe I answered my own question? Glenn Weinberg (A): JDS is our recommended desktop solution. You should see performance improvements with the accelerated NVIDIA drivers for x64 and with the switch to the Xorg server on SPARC. Charly (Q): What type of projects are you implemented in common with Linux?? Mike and Tim (A): Sun contributes to many Open Source projects and communities. For example, we invest in GNOME as our desktop which'benefits both Solaris and Linux-based distributions. We also deliver a bunch of cool Open Source software utilities onon Solaris for which we contribute bug fixes back to the originating communities. However, our major investments in OS kernel technology are in Solaris. Nabarun Mazumder (Q): can u tell us more on "Sun Managed Services" Otto Wright (A): Sun Managed Services is a very exciting part of our business where we are engaging with customers to figure out a highly customized solutions that are based on our own and industry best practices (SunTone & ITIL). Right now Operations Management is big part of what we do, but Managed Security and Managed Storage also emerging as big priorities for our customers. You should check out the Sun OMS at sun.com/executives/iforce/integratedsolutions/oms bill (Q): When is Sun going to offer for sale a AMD-64 Sun-mini. Make a great desktop server and a neat developer machine. Loaded with Solaris 10 of course. Bjorn Andersson (A): We are not disclosing information on future products, but we're actively building out a full product family based on the AMD Opteron CPU and we agree that the combination of Solaris 10 and these systems make a great development environment. mcerveny (Q): Do you prepare new "Inside Jack Episode" ? Hal Stern (A): "Jack" is a very hot topic of conversation right now inside the company. be ready for some more fun content from "jack" justlistening (Q): (decided to ask a question) Solaris 10, X86 Would be more useful if it supported more (any?) applications; Ansys, Matlab, Cadence, Silvaco. Is Sun making any attempts to solve this issue? Chris Ratcliffe (A): Yes, in fact over the last quarter we have seen a 5x increase in application support for Solaris on x86 and this is continuing to grow. For more information, please go to: https://iforce.sun.com/partners/10moves/solutions.html It's a very exciting time for Solaris, since the launch of Solaris 10 in November 04 we have added over 170 application vendors who have never made their products available on any previous version of Solaris. PeteK77 (Q): re: TV PR: Cisco advertised during some recent sporting championship, possibly the Big Dance (NCAA). I doubt a lot of CTO were buying routers the next day. Hal Stern (A): we focus very much on creating perception; we do this through parnterships and sponsorships (check out mlb.com) where the partner has a set of problems that are similar to a broad set of sun customers (mlb.com is a huge rich media, transactional management, and JSP management site). we are also driving perception through a lot more transaprency, mostly via blogs.sun.com. cisco (and ibm and microsoft) have strong or growing consumer presences and it makes sense for them to advertise in consumer media vehicles. topbannana (Q): Hi Judy - thanks for that answer; just what we like to hear! wrt fabric switches; interop support of more switches than is currently supported while using the SFS/Leadville stack Judy Depuy (A): Sun will release more switches in the future and they will be fully heterogeneous in the SAN infrastructure. Additionally, if the system has the open SAN implementation then switches should be heterogeneous. I would recommend going to our sun.com/storage site and check out the 'what works with what' (w4) tables. That is the safest place to locate what is interoperable and what is fully supported. groenveld (Q): Are we going to see a label aware GNOME for Trusted Solaris extensions for Solaris 10? John groenveld@acm.org Tim Marsland (A): The initial release of the trusted extensions to Solaris 10 will still be CDE-based, though we're investigating a GNOME version. Michael (Q): With the total networking of homes becoming a growing industry, is this something on your radar? Hal Stern (A): on the radar, yes, in terms of being an indirect demand generator. all of those networked homes are going to use internet services for transactions, archival storage, entertainment, and real- time news (whether RSS or more traditional news). providing the infrastructure to those services is sun's basic business. Nabarun (Q): Do u think that India is one of the emerging market for Sun ..Whats ur support plan for India Glenn Weinberg (A): We have a strong presence in India and expect that presence to grow significantly in the future. In fact I just visited India last week and am very enthuiastic about our prospects there, especially with OpenSolaris. octave (Q): Can someone comment on project "lockheart"? Jay Daliparthy (A): If you are referring to a Browser interface, Project Lockhart is an internal toolkit to build browser applications. maal (Q): After limiting access to the Sun System Handbook and SunSolve to contract customers, are there any plans to strengthen the Sun Support Forums by Sun employees volunteering? Hal Stern (A): three part answer: (1) we have limited access to various support resources to customers with contracts to ensure that we respect the financial commitment made by customers who buy these entitlements. (2) we have offered support subscriptions for things like the free solaris RTU at very reasonable prices, even for an individual or hobby user. (3) sun employees have been providing for- free information in a variety of forums, ranging from java.net to blogs.sun.com. in bryan cantrill's blog, for example, you'll see more detail about the implementation of Dtrace than you'd get through a support type query. walterg (Q): Regarding Sun Storage--does sun have plans of pull high- end features such as virtualization of storage down to entry-level products? Jason Schaffer (A): Yes. Right now we are focused on driving the 6920 mid-range virtulization platform. That is where customer demand is and that is where Sun can do things our competitors can not. Over time you will see these data services and virtulization technologies extend across product offerings. Jonathan Hoopes (Q): A 32-thread chip seems like a good place to run multiple (disparate) operating systems. Janus and Zones provide virtualization on top of Solaris but what about native system support for Solaris running 'next' to Windows on shared silicon. Does the Sun/Microsoft interop roadmap (on either Opteron or SPARC systems) or current product include this feature? Tim Marsland (A): We're investigating various hardware virtualization technologies which would allow us to run different operating systems side-by-side. Several companies have related technologies; there are also Open Source efforts in this area which are of interest to us. gentimjs (Q): as a user of gentoo linux, i have been eagerly following the ongoing development of Portage on Solaris by a few developers and early-adopters of solaris10.. does sun have any plans to support/develop any alternate package managment sysetms (not neccessarily portage) on Solaris? Glenn Weinberg (A): We are always looking for better solutions to complex problems. This is another area where we expect the OpenSolaris community to drive investigation and implementation of alternatives. In fact, some of those solutions already exist. Have you looked at blastwave.org, for example? TCP (Q): ?Are there any customized bundled package that I could leverage today, then upgrade at a future time? Chris Ratcliffe (A): Can you be more precise please? We have many bundled offerings dependent on the market you are interested in and problem you are trying to solve. John (Q): I know Sun offers several identity solutions - can you provide some more info? John Barco (A): Sun offers a complete set of identity management products that enable directory services, access management, federation, user provisioning, user self-service to enable strong security and controls across your IT applications and services. Sun's strategy is to provide a complete, integrated suite of products that run on multiple OS platforms and easily integrate into your existing IT environment. Visit sun.com/identity for more information on our solutions. Antnee (Q): How much value do you place on hobbyist users? Obviously they will never spend the kind of money that corporate users do, but these are the people who REALLY want to use Sun, especially at home. Do you think you may have alienated some of these users by locking up areas of SunSolve? Hal Stern (A): i think we've been trying to reach out to hobbyist users with the free solaris right to use. the goal is to reduce the entry cost to zero, which is targeted at individuals (hobby users or otherwise). however, at the same time, we offer service subscriptions (at a very reasonable price) for this product, which unlock most of the sunsolve areas in question. jim (Q): This was really great. Thanks for doing it. Moderator (A): We are glad you are finding the chat useful. Thank you. gentimjs (Q): im not really familliar with sun's NAS products and info on interface seems sparse.. are they essentially lowpower "servers" with a ton of storage built in which I run an OS on, or are they an external attachment which i install a driver for on my existing server? or something else entirely? John Fowler (A): NAS is a device deticated to storing and sharing files via protocls such as NFS and CIFS. The protocls run on high powered processors within the device to maximize system performance and simplify management. Check out www.sun.com/storage for some more NASinformation and details of our high performance 5000 family of NAS. mikepfive (Q): This is great - but its too fast. How can I get a transcript ? mikep@pcs.co.uk Moderator (A): We will post a transcript of the chat on our Web site. You will receive an email to let you know when the transcript is posted. gentimjs (Q): do your opteron powered systems feature a more pc-bios like firmware, or a more sparc-bootprom like firmware? Eric Nielsen (A): The opteron powered system features a more pc-bios like firmware. There is also a on-board system controller that supports PC standard IPMI management interfaces. Similiar interfaces are found on other Intel/AMD based servers. gentimjs (Q): the thin/ray environment seems a lot like the old mainframe/vt-220 environment to me .. while i like the idea and the concept, do you forsee the thin/ray market going the same direction as mainframe/vt did, maybe 10 years out? Hal Stern (A): the MF/VT220 environment relied on a dedicated connection between system and terminal. the sunray/thin client is a networked environment, and we're assuming the sunray server is networked itself. what drove people away from the mainframe was a lack of individual control and flexibility; what was great about it was the control and quality of operations. i think we get the best of both (control, quality and networking) with the sunray environment. estecche (Q): Hi you all. What about the Solaris support to products like Oracle? (Cause these days a lot of products are supported by RedHat or Fedora). Glenn Weinberg (A): Oracle, along with hundreds of other software vendors, either already support or are committed to support Solaris 10 on both SPARC and x86/x64. buggi1000 (Q): Could you say something about the solaris 10 adaption rate? I know, its still early to count the eggs, but it would be interesting to hear, if some of your Wallstreet customers are really keen on pushing this new stuff? Chris Ratcliffe (A): We are seeing significant interest from a number of major customers including those on Wall St. At this point in time we have over 1.4 Million registered licenses for Solaris 10, over 2/3rds of which are on x86/x64 platforms. Over 90 of the Fortune 100 are currently running Solaris 10 in their environments. We'll be releasing some outstanding customer success stories in the near future. Moderator: Update! Jonathan Schwartz has left the chat room. Please keep sending in your questions to our panel of experts. Salvador (Q): What is the future of Advanced services? Otto Wright (A): Our Advanced Services business is really growing and we are focusing on more and more sophisticated solutions. Going forward you will see us take on more multi-platform support, and doing more with remote management as a way to streamline a customer's operations. Our Utility Computing business is also growing where we are managing the infrastructure. octave (Q): My company is in the process of doing an N1 grid deployment. We're a financial company. Do you see a trend for companies in our industry to implement grids for research tasks? Jim Sangster (A): Absolutely, we do see the Financial industry as one of the leading industries utilizing grid technologies for technical as well as enterprise workloads. dschanen (Q): Will we ever see optimized Solaris x86 for X.org or Xsun available nVidia graphics cards bundled with the Sun's Opteron workstation line? Particularly I would like to see OpenGL hardware support. Glenn Weinberg (A): The accelerated NVIDIA drivers should be available next month. iplanet (Q): Jonathan - have you ever contemplated the Beta vs. VHS "case study" - how better technology doesn't necessarily beam better marketing? How will Sun execute differently based on that lesson? Subodh Bapat (A): Sun has always been a supporter of open standards and open technologies. Note that Sun was founded on the precept of open systems, since UNIX was far more open than the proprietary OSs that were dominant in the 1980s. Sun continues to believe and champion open protocols and open standards, not just because they enable better technology but also because it is a sound business practice. amit (Q): are u doing some linux pojects Mike and Tim (A): Sun is doing many things to contribute to many OpenSource projects and communities. For example, our work on Gnome which benefits Solaris and Linux. Our core OS technology efforts are focused on Solaris. stshank (Q): With which Solaris update will will ZFS and Janus be released? Glenn Weinberg (A): These features are not scheduled for specific updates at this time. Our intent is that they will be released in CY06. topbannana (Q): can someone comment on how serious Sun are to the open SAN cause and when will more and more 3rd party Storage Subsystems be supported under the SUN FC stack, oh and other fabric switches that are not 'supported' now? Judy Depuy (A): Sun is very serious to the open SAN cause. All Sun priced HBAs are compatible and supported today to a certain degree. Within a quarter, an internal project, called Open Leadville, will have Sun HBAs fully heterongeneous. Being fully heterogeneous, we will be compatible with 3rd party storage subsystems. I'm not sure what your issues are wrt fabric switches. Would you mind elaborating? ILoveSun (Q): Do you have any customers that are in the process of abandoning their datacenter by moving to your Grid? Jim Parkinson (A): yes we are working with a number of customers moving compute load to SunGrid. octave (Q): I saw that iSCSI and Infiniband are supported in Solaris 10. Any products from Sun comming out that will take advantage of these new interfaces? Chris Ratcliffe (A): Yes, we already sell Infiniband cards with our Opteron systems and supported by Solaris 10. octave (Q): With network computing being a huge focus for Sun, will we see data centers around the country that customers can have their applications hosted on? Jim Parkinson (A): that is the purpose of the application grid, it is not hosting in the tradtional sense. but it will enable customer to buy computing resources as needed to run applications. octave (Q): Will Sun produce storage products that have embedded Solaris with ZFS? Jason Schaffer (A): That is quite possible. And whe we do, we will be able to move data around a system faster than anyone else on the planet! QFS and SAM are more examples of innovation in policy and file management that when layered with Solaris 10 provide solutions that out scale and out perform anything from EMC, Net App, IBM, HP or others. wei_jiang (Q): Do you have a road map for your j2ee server? Hal Stern (A): by J2EE server i'll assume you mean web + application server components of the java enterprise system (JES). we are continuing to evolve both of these components, focusing on the top- level customer "value" in the JES stack (taking more of a solutions focus) and also with incorporating the latest releases of J2EE into the application server, improving integration (with databases, for example) and implementing new application development patterns like services oriented architecture (SOA) suneel (Q): Similar to SPARC systems, does sun offer Opteron processor upgrade for W2100z? Jim Sangster (A): We keep making faster Opteron workstations available. amy (Q): John Fowler: IBM's price for Gluecode is free. It's hard to be cheaper than free. Subodh Bapat (A): Note that IBM's price for Websphere is NOT free. Sun's middleware stack is a robust, well-integrated stack, with many feature advantages over IBM's Websphere stack. Note that Sun is a big supporter and the biggest contributor to the OpenSource community, having donated all of OpenOffice and OpenSolaris to the open source community. Sun's middleware stack is as tightly integrated and certified for third-party applications as Gluecode's. Antnee (Q): In response to John Fowlers comments on IA64 compared to x64, I agree that memory bottlenecks are often the problem, but other manufacturers such as SGI have over come this problem and built incredible machines, such as Altix and Prism. Couldn't Sun do the same? Why do I feel like you'd rather avoid a sinking ship? ;) John Fowler (A): IA64 is going to be limited to small market. The software ecosystem around EMT64 and AMD64 will alwasy be so many times bigger that they will be huge markets. In the SGI case - they overcame NUMA tendencies of large clusters. They did not overcome the individual memory latency of each processor. This affects what application workloads you are best for. Selling a small number of supercomputers doens't interest us -- selling supercomputers PLUS lots of other stuff does interest us..... octave (Q): I've been really impressed with the included /usr/sfw applications in Solaris 10. Is Sun planning on maintaining these as new releases of things like Apache and Samba are released? Glenn Weinberg (A): Thank you! We definitely plan to keep up with community development as closely as we can. Francois Bousquet (Q): What is exactly the technology that Sun will get from Taratella acquisition ? John Loiacono (A): The ability to run just about any application (Solaris, Windows, Linux, mainframe, AS/400) over just about any network on just about any device (PC, workstation, thin client, mobile handset, set top box, etc.). Nabarun (Q): do u think that Redhat is going to be a big share holder in linux flavour Mike and Tim (A): Certainly the market data indicates that in the US at least RedHat is a leader in the Linux space but in different parts of the world other distributions seem to be more popular. But with the enhanced support for x86 systems in Solaris 10 and the advent of OpenSolaris, we believe that Solaris will gain significant additional market share. Nabarun (Q): Are u planning to come in IT Infrastucture support bussiness as HP and IBM is doing now a days .. Otto Wright (A): In fact we are already doing a lot of heterogeneous support and managing some very complex, multi-platform environments. Our approach is very different than HP & IBM in that we focus on the process elements (ITIL) and technology (Sun Connection & SevenSpace), instead of masses of consultants. PeteK77 (Q): Does Tarantella meet Sun's needs to be able to run Windows applications directly, or is it still via a browser? John Loiacono (A): All the client needs is Java. That is most often in the form of a Java-enabled browser, but is not solely via a browser. The reason we like this approach is that if you have a Java-enabled system, you need no additional code to be placed on the client, and none on the server where the application runs (be is Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mainframe, etc.). No code requirements there mean no root access which equates to better security. cody (Q): what is the status of project Honeycomb? James Whitmore (A): It's right on track. Yu can expect to see announcements of product within the final quarter of this calendar year. gentimjs (Q): As a DIY enthusiast that abandoned plans last year to build a sparc-based desktop "from parts" due to the cost of the SX mobos, do you have any partners you can suggest which sell "bare" sparc motherboards or CPUs ? Any plans sun will market the SX line (or simmilar products) to end users in addition to resellers/OEMs ? Andy Ingram (A): While our SPARC systems boards sell primarily to OEMs who incorporate these into their final product,anyone can buy one of these products. That being said, these products are targeted to the OEMs and the functionality, pricing and support model may not be ideal for your particluar situation. buggi1000 (Q): Guys, it seems to me, that your the only one in the server-industry that recognized the GREAT potential of the hole Opteron platform. Keep up the good work and we hope we could hear more exciting from this in the future. Be commited. Jim Parkinson (A): We are completely committed. You'll see a pile of new products. Stay tuned. And AMD dual core rocks. walterg (Q): What one storage company is Sun's storage products attempting to replace? James Whitmore (A): EMC & Network Appliance are the two key competitors. With our innovative 6920 platform we are winning against EMC and the 5000 NAS family is driving market share in the NAS segment. Antnee (Q): John Fowler often mentions AMD outperforming Intel, but is it not true that IA64 is far superior to x64? I understand that there is a development cost in building software for IA64 but still, isn't it the performance that you want? John Fowler (A): Opteron outperforms IA64 in almost all cases. The only advantage that IA64 can sometimes have is in esoteric bencharks that require really huge caches. The reason Opteron does so well is that it has much lower memory latency than either Xeon or IA64. In the real world, you are mostly waiting for memory -- so lower memory latency is a huge advantage. We recently published benchmarks in which Opteron beat both IA64 and Power5. If you factor in price, the gap is even wider. octave (Q): Is Sun planning on starting OpenSolaris/Solaris user groups in major cities to help develop communities around Solaris? Glenn Weinberg (A): We've already seen tremendous interest in forming user groups around the world and will do everything we can to support them. groenveld (Q): Why has Support been so slow to issue SunAlerts for the known security vulnerabilities in its builds of Mozilla.ORG's browser? John groenveld@acm.org Subodh Bapat (A): Sun has a goal of promptly issuing SunAlerts as soon as any known security vulnerabilities are known. Appropriate security fixes/patches are issued promptly as soon as they are available. We follow this policy this policy for all products. tux_chat (Q): With jds now available on Solaris 10 x86, would you still recommend JDS/Linux Vs Solaris 10 on a laptop? John Loiacono (A): First, we still offer both. Our main emphasis will continue to be JDS on S10. But in the end, the decision will be driven by other factors including application and peripheral dependencies. S10 now runs on neary 400 systems and has more than 1100 applications. They key will be does it support the exact ones you need. gintas (Q): When will BIND 9 be supported in Solaris? Chris Ratcliffe (A): BIND9 is included and supported as part of Solaris 10. You can download and install Solaris 10 at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp mcerveny (Q): Will you support more languages in Solaris/Gnome (for example Czech) ? (there is not possible to use Solaris in schools without native language support) Glenn Weinberg (A): The basic support for many languages, including Czech, has been in Solaris for some time. In fact Sun contributed the internationalization support to the Gnome community. What we do not provide is a full "locale" with translated messages for Czech. We expect this is one of the areas the OpenSolaris community will engage in. Mark001 (Q): In your utility computing offering, can customers specify the OS for their particular compute job - Solaris 10, Linux 9.3, etc.? Jim Parkinson (A): We will work with all customer interested in sunGrid. groenveld (Q): Are dual-core Opterons also on the stationary workstation roadmap? John groenveld@acm.org John Fowler (A): We will use dual core across our products. Stay tuned. gentimjs (Q): does sun have any plans to take advantage of the AMD Turion low-power x64 CPUs ? John Fowler (A): Not at this time, although we are looking at 68W Opteron. The problem is that the overall efficiency is actually better with higher power cpus - to accomplish the same work you have to have more low power cpus but you also pay power price for memory, etc. mh31n1612 (Q): do you offer any internship programs for students at sun? If yes where can we get the details from? Jonathan Schwartz (A): Yes - we're hiring interns all the time. Just send email to the aliases you'll find on sun.com. amy (Q): What does Sun think about the IBM acquisition of GlueCode and its potential affect on middleware pricing. Does Sun mind that IBM now owns an open source version of a J2EE application server? John Loiacono (A): The most critical factor for us is the proliferation of the Java platform vs. .NET. There have been open source versions of the app server out for some time. We continue to be confident that we will be far more aggressive with our entire middleware pricing than IBM. We've done so to date and will continue. kfu (Q): It seems that most Sun servers are not like their PC conter parts, which are most likely made in China. Does Sun have a lot of server manufacture activities in China? Andy Ingram (A): When Sun does the final assembly of our systems, this occurs in our facilities in Oregon and Scotland. The components, subassemblies, and, in some cases, the systems itself are produced'by a wide variety of sub-contractors located around the world. Over the years, many of these sub-contractors have moved their manufacturing out of the US and Europe to Asia. As a result, a significant portion of these components do come from China, Taiwan, and Korea. av8tor26 (Q): What's customer/market's reaction to Sun's 6920 storage system? James Whitmore (A): Fantastic. 6920 started shipping 6 months ago and we have seen major wins in all geographies and industries including some major win-backs from EMC. Recent announcement of new data services software (snap shot,replication, heterogenious host & array support) will further fule the growth of 6920. It's everything EMC wish they could make the CX! Antnee (Q): A question for John Fowler as a follow up to my previous question: This 'wireless laptop' SunRay that you speak of... is it a prototype or is it available already? John Fowler (A): Shipping from Tadpole now. Go for it. rheilke (Q): On the documentation front: any idea when the SMF Service Development documentation (other than the sdev_intro piece posted) will move from Coming Soon to Here It Is? Mike and Tim (A): It is being worked on now and will be done in the next month or two. We'll post on the BigAdmin forum to indicate when it will be available and where. ncchat05 (Q): When do you believe the Geo-Cluster product will become available? Jim Sangster (A): We are not announcing any future products today, and this was not part of the recent NC event......but stay tuned on this front! ncchat05 (Q): you mention Sun is collaborating with MS regarding Network Computing, but mention in your blog about MS writing the Desktop to Windows and not the Internet. Seems like MS is just perpetuating the fat-client trend. Hal Stern (A): our interoperability work with microsoft is meant to ensure that our enterprise services behave and exchange appropriate information within (and between) our customers' data centers. nearly everyone of our larger customers has some microsoft desktop presence, and we want to be able to apply federation principles to the management of identity and security controls across the enterprise. on the desktop, though, we are very interested in harnessing the aggregation of services (and resources) on the web -- the richness is in the network, not on the desktop. face it, RSS is more interesting than searching your own documents.....check out something like technorati for an example of a "rich" RSS experience. gentimjs (Q): what is the official sun position on sparc powered laptops? I've seen some 3rd party models, but frankly the 5 digit prices were unrealisitic. John Fowler (A): Tadpole and Naturetech have SPARC laptops. We are working with them to reduce cost. Carl (Q): I have seen decline of applets use in the web in favor of flash, does Sun have a strategy to revive applets? A: The total market is growing - more and more products (like Grokker or Callidus) are being shipped running Java, but they're certainly more sophisticated apps, vs. consumer content. On mobile handsets, it's by far the other direction - most consumer content (games) are written to Java. So Flash is both a partner, and competitor... gentimjs (Q): any plans for an opteron or athlon64 based SunPCI card for sparc systems? John Fowler (A): Not at this time. tux_chat (Q): When will "Skype like" functionality be available on SunRays ? John Fowler (A): You can run Skype on a Sunray now. Oscar Lozano (Q): Will sun's entry level servers portfolio concentrate only in AMD systems? US IIIi servers with new frecuencies can't approach to Opteron performance John Fowler (A): No, you will continue to see a broad family of SPARC sytems. Customers are buying them in droves as you see from our quarterly results. We will also be introducing some more radical products in the SPARC family, where a single chip with 8 cores acts as a 32 way in a small rack mount server. You'll have to decide if that's "entry" or not - but it certainly will offer huge value for price. In a number of benchmarks it will beat the pants off Opteron. sunstrong (Q): Can we get more information regarding the event advertised for June 1st (http://www.sun.com/june1st) Jonathan Schwartz (A): That would spoil the surprise. Nabarun (Q): Sir whats ur future plan for Asia Hal Stern (A): a two-part answer: in terms of opportunity we are continuing to invest in our sales, services and customer solutions (consulting) staff in asia. we have seen interest in wireless solutions, java desktop, staroffice, and other sun technologies, all driven by rapid technology adoption by the consumers in asia. the second part of the answer is that from an engineering perspective, we are growing our resources in europe and asia (czech, russia, india and china) faster than in the US for software engineering. octave (Q): Sun has released a lot of incredible products this year. But the coverage in the public is still pretty low. Is Sun planning on running tv commercials? I think Sun is missing out on some good coverage that could help its image. Jonathan Schwartz (A): We agree, but TV is the single most expensive advertising venue out there, and continually declining real value to us (most of our target demographic is on-line - so that's where we're focused). Viswa Soft (Q): hai im viswanatha doing M.Tech ,i want to know how to create our own run time environment Mike and Tim (A): Do you mean Java Run-Time Environment? J Mond (Q): When are you going to have a HomeRay? Barbie, SpongeBob, Wiggles smart-cards seem perfect for the kids! John Loiacono (A): With the addition of the Tarentella technology (the ability to run just about any application on any device, including a Sun Ray), we now have the key functionality that has hindered us making inroads with internet service providers. Work is already in progress. Stay tuned. BTW, I have one at home today. Had it for 6 months now. Dorothy (Q): Do you have an idea of how much Solaris 10 is actually used regularly? Although there have been some 1.2 million downloads, how does the number translate for actual usage? Chris Ratcliffe (A): At this point in time, the number is actually closer to 1.4 million and it's actually registered Solaris 10 systems, not downloads. Virtually every customer I talk to is looking at and running Solaris 10 in some part of their environment including over 90 of the Fortune 100. TCP (Q): ? How can an iForce Partner participate in the Display Grid Development Process? Jim Parkinson (A): contact your local iforce team and they can get you hooked into the development process. PeteK77 (Q): Does Sun have plans to open a retail web shop using its NGrid for competitors of Salesforce.com, Ebay, Amzn etc Judy Depuy (A): Sun Grid Utility is designed with a web storefront that enables our partners to collaborate w/ us. Their customers can go through their portal interface that is powered by the Sun Grid. Bottom line is focus on both our partners and Sun's core competencies. Additionally, there is a retail portal where end user customers can directly access Sun's grid. So basically we are taking a 2 prong approach. gentimjs (Q): any plans on a sparc powered system using the AGP buss for graphics ? or PCI express ? John Fowler (A): No AGP. PCI-Express is our direction. Stay tuned. ashok (Q): can i know how the multithreading is implemented in solaris? Jonathan Schwartz (A): Solaris 10 uses a 1:1 threading model where user threads created using the POSIX APIs are mapped to kernel light- weight processes (LWPs) which are actual kernel threads. The full OpenSolaris release this year will make all of the source code that implements these features available to you. You can also check out the Solaris Kernel Internals book by Mauro and McDougall for more information. PeteK77 (Q): What is your response to the bloggers who perceive off shoring as a precursor to the decline of American engineering? Jonathan Schwartz (A): The market will grow around the world - it always has, it always will. Sun, like every global company, needs to grow in, and with, the market. It's not the decline of anything, it's the rise of a continually globalizing market - yes, competition's increasing for everyone (American co's as much as American engineering), but so is the market opportunity. Antnee (Q): A more lighthearted question: Do you think you could get your web-programmers to allow you to enable/disable auto-refreshing of the main frame where we read the questions and answers here? It's really quite off-putting when you're half way through reading a message and it refreshes and you find yourself having to scroll down again and find where you were. At which point another post comes through! Moderator (A): To avoid having the screen refresh on you in the midst of reading an answer, just click on the name of the person answering the question. The Q&A will pop-up in a separate window. buggi1000 (Q): Are you claiming that your the number 1 company in shipping Opteron products. HP says the same - so who is right? What are your growing goals for the Opteron platform? Is there something coming in the future that could drive the existing growth even more? John Fowler (A): Hector Ruiz said at our analyst conference that we were number one in the big vendors. He should know. IDC and Gartner data suggest HP and not us. We don't know for sure, but believe that the difference is that we have built very large facilities for selling compute through large grids to the public using Opteron systems. IDC/Gartner do not count those. We are tremendously excited by our growth and we only have 4 products - two workstations and two servers. One of our primary efforts to grow is to expand our product line both up and down as well as drive channel programs and Solaris acceptance. The future is bright. mcerveny (Q): Do you opensource SunRay protocol ? Glenn Weinberg (A): We intend to open the protocol, yes. gintas (Q): Sun Connection sounds like outsourcing to me. What's you take on that? Subodh Bapat (A): Sun Connection is a way of helping data centers reduce their cost of IT Operations. Sun Connection delivers economies of scale to IT Operations by delivering monitoring, patching and other routine administration services over the network. Sun Connection has no relationship with the outsourcing or IT development activities. RAH (Q): There are rumors that Sun is buying StorageTek. Comments? James Whitmore (A): We don't comment on rumors and speculation. But we do have a healthy pipeline of organic and in-organic growth opportunities such as our announcement this week of technology aquisition from Procom. This brings an industry leading (price/performance) NAS product into Sun's technology portfolio which layered with every thing we do in Solaris 10, file systems, policy systems & content systems will position Sun to take on Nett App & EMC in this fast growing segment. David (Q): Is there any possibility of porting Sun Ray software to Microsoft Windows? It's java code, so it seems it should be a possibility. John Loiacono (A): No plans currently. It runs today on Solaris (both SPARC and x86) as well as Linux. gentimjs (Q): any plans for enhanced USB / HID support for solaris/Sparc ? I've been trying to make a USB joystick/HID device work in solaris for almost a year with no progress :-( Glenn Weinberg (A): Converting SPARC over to the Xorg X server later this year should address this issue. kfu (Q): Do you have SunRay server on your grids? Is sun going to offer such service in the future and charge the Sun Ray end user xx$/year? Jim Parkinson (A): yes we have a service we are building called the display grid. we are working many different ways to bring that to market. the pricing model is being defined. buggi1000 (Q): What are the potential performance increases, when Solaris 10 or 11 is/would be more optimized for X86-64Bit applications. What do you say, but what level todays-apps are already optimized? What could we expect from SUN in the future - I'm thinking of new JAVA versions ... Hal Stern (A): obviously with solaris 11 still in development we can't speculate about future performance. performance improvements going to solaris 10 and any 64 bit platforms (SPARC or x64) are going to come from three areas: (1) generate operating system performance improvements, in solaris 10 particularly around network stack and large memory (and also large I/O) processes (2) tuning the application to best use the OS facilities, generally done through inspection with Dtrace to see how the application is consuming resources, buffering I/O, or scheduling work (we've seen 30-300% performance improvements) and (3) using very large address spaces (> 4GB) where there is a time- space tradeoff to be made, keeping more data in memory to avoid I/O. obviously (3) involves some application re-architecture, but we should always optimize around the resourec that can be "wasted" in exchange for the resource that is precious. in this case, massive memory space (provided you have the physical memory under it) is exchanged for execution time. PeteK77 (Q): Why sell AMD if Intel outsells them? Branding seems to be the target not perfmormance. John Fowler (A): AMD outperforms Intel by a wide margin right now. With their dual core server chips the performance/watt advantage is literally 3 to 1. AMD also allows us to build systems from 1 socket to 8 socket, and Intel is only up to 4 socket. If Intel makes better chips we will look at using them. Right now they don't. See anandtech.com or many other benchmark sites for how big the advantages are. bud (Q): is this chat going to be available later on for review & re- read? Moderator (A): Yes, we will be posting a transcript of the chat. We will send you an email to let you know when it is available. stshank (Q): Why did Java Enterprise System sales flatten out so much in the most recent quarter? Jonathan Schwartz (A): A few large deals fell out of the quarter, partially, and Q3 always tends to be tough - we would've liked it to be stronger. And we're obviously focused on driving success in Q4. suneel (Q): Does Sun has any plans to develop Video editing or wireless suport drivers for Solaris x86 to attract home users? Glenn Weinberg (A): Wireless drivers are currently under development and evaluation, as is FireWire camera support. Video editing will depend on the availability of third party software packages. If you have a package you're interested in, please let the vendor know. sunseeker (Q): Are Sun planning to to produce a "laptop" range or equivilantly purposed products ? John Fowler (A): We partner with tapdole for Sunray laptops and qualify for 130 other companies laptops. TCP (Q): ?Will the Next Generation of PrimePower Servers have any type of Fujitsu WiMax chip utiliztion for WISP's? Andy Ingram (A): Futures on PrimePower is probably a question that is better asked of Fujitsu. However, the follow on to their PrimePower line is the APL product line which is part of the joint development agreement between Sun and Fujitsu. Mark001 (Q): In the area of utility computing, where does Sun currently see the greatest business potential - bioinformatics, financial, geophysical, manufacturing, etc. Jim Parkinson (A): We see great potential in the following markets -- financial, entertainment/media,geophysical, bio-studies,phara- chem,ECAD, MCAE David (Q): One of Sun's greatest strengths is R&D - but it seems that the vast bulk of Sun's storage line is OEM products. Where is Sun going here? Best of breed is good, but what kind of R&D is Sun still focusing on in the storage space? James Whitmore (A): We continue to have huge investments in data management and storage R&D. It's not a hardware play, storage devices (disk, controllers, tape drives etc) are commodities and we will continue to leverage a supply chain to brng best of breed hardware to market. we will innovate where it matters - system architectures that enable huge scale (such as our 6920 disk array), software that enable simplicity of management across complex storage environments, file systems, content systems and policy systems that drive scale and performance across heterogeneous environments. A focus on open standards and an understanding of managing information/data security and compliance underpin these investments. max (Q): Jonathan, We use SUN servers with EMC and NetApp and are currently considering EMC CX700 to consolidate Windows and smaller Solaris servers. Now we see SUN has a new product, 6920. We have never considered SUN storage before and would like to know how the 6920 is a better option for us. Jason Schaffer (A): When it comes to consolidation, the Sun SE6920 is much better than the EMC CX700. In fact, the SE6920 is architecturally designed to bring many high-end features to the mid-market. For example, * the SE6920 will enable you to securely (physically) isolate storage resources for each of your target applications...this is what we call Storage Containers. * the EMC CX700, by contrast, will force you to put all your applications on the same storage resource....making it impossible to manage to unique SLAs Other SE6920 advantages include; * 100% non-disruptive FW upgrades (CX700 can not do this) * dedicated and scalable CPUs for data protection software (CX700 can not do this) * ability to scale for both capacity and performance (CX700 can not do this) * ability to provision by application ?storage profiles? (CX700 can not do this) * ability to integrate/use heterogeneous storage arrays (CX700 can not do this) * ability to scale to over 400 disk drives (CX700 can only do about ½ of this) ....and I'm just getting started. Ask your Sun Sales person for additional details. For example, * the SE6920 will enable you to securely, physically isolate storage resources for each of your target applications...this is what we call Storage Containers. * the EMC CX700, by contrast, Salvador (Q): when will tarantella software be available from Sun? John Loiacono (A): The acquisition is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of this year. Once closed, we will immediately offer the product from Sun. buggi1000 (Q): When are the new Opteron Galaxy Server ready for shipping? John Fowler (A): Summer in the northern hemisphere. In the meantime, the existing V20z and V40z products support the fastest AMD CPUS including dual core. tux_chat (Q): Are there any plans to create a dtrace tutorial for developers? While dtrace can detect "bottleneck" in the source code, it not always true that developers are OS savvy enough to use Dtrace... Or are they ? Mike Shapiro (A): We've done several things to make DTrace easy to learn and use for developers: (a) we've written a 400-page manual packed with real examples that you can download or read on docs.sun.com, (b) we've shipped over 80 useful examples in source code form in /usr/demo/dtrace/ in Solaris 10, and (c) we're offering a class for IT professionals through SunU that enterprises can sign up for to get hands-on training. On the technical, we're actively working on ways to make DTrace more accessible to programmers and administrators. For example, in Solaris 10 we've shipped intrstat(1M) and plockstat(1M), tools that answer important developer questions with a pre-built interface but that use DTrace behind the scenes. Jonathan Hoopes (Q): Was the JP Morgan deal a RedHat displacement (in other words a RedHat to Solaris migration)? I don't think that was mentioned in the press release. Hal Stern (A): obviously our customers in the financial services space retain their privacy about platforms; what we've announced is that we are continuing and extending a 20-year relationship with JP Morgan specifically focusing on grids and other financial application development platforms. TCP (Q): ? Does Sun have any type of (Sun/Tarantela )Thin Notebook type Product, that compliments a mobile Sun Ray Scenario, in an Enterprise WAN? John Fowler (A): We partner with Tadpole for Sunray laptops. In fact, I'm typing this response on one of their laptops - we have a room full of them here. They have a couple of models with different size screens, and the batteries last forever since they aren't driving disks and hot CPUs. You can also use them at home, they are low bandwidth. I've heard that DSL 192 is ok, but I know that DSL 384 is good for sure. Jonathan Hoopes (Q): What is the long term deployment and user base vision of SunRay? Is it mainly an enterprise solution or does Sun see it gaining significant traction with 'consumers' in the home? John Loiacano (A): To date Sun Ray has been most successful in the government, education and manufacturing markets. The biggest hinderances to wider adoption has been the lack of WAN/broadband support and the inability to cost-effectively run traditional PC applications, read: Windows. With the pending acquisition of Tarentella this week, combined with the announcement of a broadband (DSL/cable) version of Sun Ray in November, we are now far more capable of broadening the appeal of it, including partnering with many of the broadband ISPs to develop consumer solutions. jmvm59 (Q): You always hear people saying that Linux is better because of the "Many Eyes" theory. I look at Linux and say would you fly in an "Open Source" airplane where the breaks were designed by a couple of guys in a garage. I view Solaris has the "Rolls Royce" of Unix, custom made with care. Do you find many large customers who feel this way? Jonathan Schwartz (A): A growing number, yes... which is why we're so excited about the growth in interest and value of the Solaris 10 free distribution (and OpenSolaris community, for those that want to build open source products and platforms). Paul Stacey (Q): Is sun planning to position Java to compete against XAML / Avalon for rich internet applications? Hal Stern (A): it's a combination of technologies: Java, XML, RSS, as well as security, privacy and trust. the 3D models and rich client ideas in avalon have some slick appeal, but my question is "what are the use cases we're solving for?" as a user of many different computing devices (WinPC, Mac, SunRay, JDS desktop, Palm, iPod) i want some measure of consistency in time and space, not necessarily a fancier fat client on the desktop. furthermore, i see a lot of the information ontological sort and aggregation happening "upstream" in the network -- think yahoo, google, and ebay -- rather than on my desktop. so the model for this is to refactor the application to have a thin client side and a richer back-end that takes advantage of other services (and large-scale grids) on the network. think java server faces.... Oscar Lozano (Q): I think the big vendor of linux is Oracle's grid model. How do you plan to change Grid/Linux/Intel model to Grid/Solaris/x86 model? Bjorn Andersson (A): Our Grid computing solutions are already available on both Solaris and Linux today. The customer can chose what environment works best for their needs and also have the ability to mix or migrate as needed. We believe Solaris has many additional benefits that play out well in more and more situations, especially as Grid is becoming more of a mainstream technology for traditionally commercially oriented applications such as database environments. groenveld (Q): Since so many Sun employees love their Acer Ferraris, any chance Sun will OEM them for those customers who need mobile workstations with state? John groenveld@acm.org John Fowler (A): We're not announcing any future products here but we have noticed this also. We have now certified 130 different laptops with Solaris 10. groenveld (Q): If Oracle won't budge on multi-core licensing and IBM won't budge on Solaris Opteron support for DB2, any change Sun will provide customers with some leverage by adding MySQL, Postgres or some other database server to the JES stack? John groenveld@acm.org Andy Ingram (A): We have always been strong supporters of Open Source software. Each release of our Solaris operating systems includes the "companion CD". This is a collection of the best of breed open source software that has been ported to Solaris (both SPARC and x86). Today this includes both MySQL and Postgres. Thus we make these products available today. mcerveny (Q): What about TCP offload engines (TOE) in Solaris (and support for iSCSI) ? Mike and Tim (A): We're engaged with various TOE vendors, but the new FireEngine TCP/IP stack in Solaris 10 is offering dramatic performance and scalability improvements on existing hardware as well and is worth looking into. iSCSI support is being worked on at present and will be available in a Solaris 10 update. ramana (Q): Currently the world is moving into a wireless age. When will Solaris scale to a full range of wireless product support? Is there any effort in thsi area & Is this support coming soon? Glenn Weinberg (A): We are pursuing wireless support as aggressively as possible. We have a number of drivers in evaluation now, both native and through NDIS wrappers. You can expect to see additional wireless support become available throughout this year and next. rani9178 (Q): Do you feel LDAP feature added to Solaris will compete with Windows 2003 & exchange 2003 & eventually win the race? Chris Ratcliffe (A): Solaris 10 includes the Sun Java System Directory Server with a license for 200,000 entries. We are working very closely with Microsoft to ensure that our products interoperate as we move forward. You'll hear more about these efforts in the coming months. buggi1000 (Q): In the last week there was a Wallstreet rumour, that a management buyout is coming. SUN disagreed with that rumour. What I want to say here is, that the SUN marketshare value is so low - what do you do to increase shareholder value? Jonathan Schwartz (A): Continue to invest in innovation, and drive growth - we're focused on both, obviously, and we ample opportunity in front of us. Now it's time to drive revenue growth and earnings, and we are absolutely committed to doing exactly that. As shareholders ourselves, we're incredibly focused on driving value. Antnee (Q): Do you feel that Thin Clients are going to take the place of traditional workstations in office environments? For example, you see many *very* basic PCs used for simple tasks, maybe just for word processing etc, things that don't require much graphical power. Things that a Ray should be more than able to deal with John Fowler (A): We believe that Thin clients are going to (finally) really take off. Networks are faster and there are clear administrative advantages and cost savings to thin clients. For example, here at Sun we have more than 30,000 Sunrays and we measure that we need one system administrator for each 1,000 to 2,000 of them, which is a stunning ratio. We also send them home now with employees as we don't have to worry about administering the devices or having confidential information stolen on local drives. In fact, I'm typing this on a Sunray which is a wireless laptop - very cool. av8tor26 (Q): does sun have program to get jds and sunrays into schools? Jonathan Schwartz (A): Absolutely - we started by driving our programming tools into the market (with NetBeans and Java), we followed up with driving OpenOffice/StarOffice, and now we're driving the whole JDS environment, with SunRay, all at the most affordable prices of any platform in the market... TCP (Q): ? Is there a Sun Ray implenetation model that Sun might have for a ASP services model targeting Small Businesses under 50 Concurrent users? Bjorn Andersson (A): yes we call it display grid and we are testing it right now. Nabarun Mazumder (Q): whats your future plan for India Jonathan Schwartz (A): We have over 1,000 employees in India already -it's one of the fastest growing and most vibrant markets we see. So we're very committed, and plan on continuing to grow as the opportunity emerges. It's one of the most dynamic places on earth right now, and we're going to be right there driving participation and opportunity for everyone. (From driving a truly free OS with Solaris/OpenSolaris along with OpenOffice, etc.) maal (Q): The current shipping version of Solaris x86 almost completely lacks cardbus support. Is there any time schedule ? Glenn Weinberg (A): We have a prototype Cardbus driver running today. It should be available in a Software Express for Solaris release later this year, and then in the first Update of Solaris following that. swa (Q): I see the zones technology as a big plus for centralizing services. Won't this affect your server-sales? BTW, this is my favorite in SOL10. Mike and Tim (A): Yes it will: we believe it will improve server sales :) Our experience has consistently been that Sun technologies that save customers money and get them the most bang for their buck out of their investments resonate strongly and open the door to further opportunities. Francois Bousquet (Q): Is grid computing the future of computing by replacing 20 Web, App, DB servers ? Is Sun grid computing running 1 Solaris 10 with zones for each customer ? Jim Parkinson (A): grid computing will not replace Web,App or DB server functionality, it will enable the more effective deployment of those technologies. Yes SunGrid uses Solaris 10 and takes advantage of Zones, they are not limited to one per custmoer. David (Q): I understand that globablly Fujitsu sells more sparc system than anyone. With the new relationship, is this a positive or possible competition? I'm not sure how to view the relationship or explain it to others. Andy Ingram (A): If you mean that Fujitsu's SPARC volume is greater than anyone other than Sun, then your comment is true. As you might expect, Sun's volume of systems sold that contain SPARC dwarfs that sold by any other vendor under their own brand. Our relationship with Fujitsu is focused on combining our engineering capabilities to continue to drive SPARC technology and systems forward. Sun's expertise in CMT technology and Fujitsu's experience with the mainframe is a formitable combination. Viswa (Q): This the question for John Fowler......How to create our own runtime environment in Java platform John Fowler (A): You can download Java from Sun.com for a variety of platforms including Solaris, Linux, and MS-Windows. There is no restriction on any applications you write for Java and no royalties so you can feel free to bundle these applications and sell them or download them to customers who have Java. Paul Stacey (Q): Is sun planning to compete with longhorn's new presentation technology avalon? As an avid fan of Java and a previous user of c#, c++, php and Flash I feel that Java could get left behind if it does not position itself to compete in the rich client arena. Applets were the first step i saw towards a rich client that was delivered through a browser but I feel that they have not really progressed in the appropriate ways. After looking at longhorn's concept video's I was very impressed but feel that Java technology could be updated to compete strongly against XAML / Avalon / c# , vb etc. John Loiacano (A): My view is Avalon's challenged by being Windows only - which as the web continues to evolve on handsets and VoIP phones and automobile dashboards... really limits its appeal. Service developers want to reach the broadest market posible - not simply serve Microsoft's desktop market. David (Q): Could you address your vision for the Tarentella integration? Will it be part of a software suite with StarOffice and SunRay like you are doing with the JES suites? Or something else entirely? John Loiacano (A): Tarentella will be fully integrated into our Client Software Group, and be part of the Sun Ray server software package. In addition to it being offered as it is today, out intent is to quickly initegrate it into Solaris 10. Solaris users will then have the ability to run nearly any application environment out of the box, and serve those applications to just about any device. PeteK77 (Q): Will Sun be getting into the business end of mobile devices? Jonathan Schwartz (A): We're already there - our infrastructure business with carriers is a multi-billion dollar segment. kfu (Q): Will the Solaris 10 (or opensolaris) be ported to PowerPC servers? Given that so many top super computer clusters are using Power CPUs and linux, didn't sun feel that Solaris may have a place in that market? John Fowler (A): Actually numerically Intel and AMD dominate the supercomputer top 500 list. IBM has a few very large ones which get lots of press. The OpenSolaris community is already working on porting Solaris to PowerPC. I have no idea when they will have something available - but, Sun also ported it a long time ago but never made it available so we know it can be done. gintas (Q): Is BioBox generating a big interest? I don't see a lot of activity at APBioNet, who are supposed to support the bioinformatics package. Hal Stern (A): a lot of the interest in grid solutions is in generalizaing how sun has built either solutions like biobox or the SunGrid utility, and taking that knowledge "in house" for building customer-owned grids. i believe that the biobox work in the asia- pacific (india/singapore) area has sparked some interest, but it's fair to say it hasn't taken off in the bioinformatics area (yet). smann65 (Q): just a clarification...you said the technology preview for Project Janus (LAE) would be available this month. Does that mean it will be available in the next Software Express? Glenn Weinberg (A): No, we are delivering the preview separately from Software Express. Francois Bousquet (Q): Part of the Sun interoperability with Microsoft product, is there any plan of adding mountsmb feature to Solaris ? (mountsmb is only available for Linux, is there any way of mounting a SMB share from Solaris ?) Chris Ratcliffe (A): At this point in time we do not support the mounting of an SMB share from Solaris. However we are working on adding this functionality at the moment. rajulal (Q): How big is Grid Computing Market and what is market share of Sun? Bjorn Andersson (A): Many analysts, including IDC, agree that the Grid Computing market is a multi billion $ market today and a rapid growth is forecasted. The market size estimates generally includes software, hardware and services. Sun has been shipping solutions in the Grid space for many years and has a unique position in that we can provide all the components that make up a Grid, including the most widely used distributed resource manager in the Sun N1 Grid Engine and the Grid Engine open source version. PeteK77 (Q): Will Sun be working in concert with Cisco to get onto the VoIP band wagon? Jonathan Schwartz (A): We're already a supplier to them (they've licensed Java on all their VoIP phones, eg.), and we run a considerable volume of softswitch infrastructure on Sun. mcerveny (Q): When will the OpenGL other features for nVidia cards be available? John Fowler (A): We will be releasing support for OpenGL using Nvidia cards on Solaris10/x86 next month. This support will also be incorporated in Solaris 10 U1 so you won't need to separately install drivers. Jose Manuel Garduño (Q): Which is your opinion on the emergent markets? for example Mexico, and Sun is interested in promoting yours products and technology in these countries? Jonathan Schwartz (A): We see a continually growing market opportunity around the globe - the good news about the internet, is that no one's arguing about its centrality to the growth of government, business or participative economies. We obviously include Mexico in that growth and opportunity. tux_chat (Q): Open solaris will hopefully increase the availability of drivers for "exotic" platform leveragin Open Source development. WHat plans do you have to incentivate community development of solaris drivers Vs Linux drivers? Mike and Tim (A): Sun's focus is on volume platforms, including the large number found on http://sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/. The main benefit of the OpenSolaris community and any community process is that community members can select other projects of interest to them, and benefit from the shared knowledge of the OpenSolaris driver source base. gentimjs (Q): any plans for an enhanced set of desktop GUI tools for solaris? for example, a more simple interface to change my IP addy or Hostname without needing to drop to a prompt? Glenn Weinberg (A): Yes, absolutely. I have an entire team dedicated to what we call Solaris approachability. It's worth noting that we won't just put GUIs on top of existing interfaces; our goal is to automate as many system administration tasks as possible. Antnee (Q): From what I can gather so far, ZFS doesn't offer anything superior to SGIs XFS, which has already been ported to Linux as well as IRIX. In fact, I gather that XFS is superior when it comes to file sizes. Is there a reason ZFS is in this position, despite being so new? Chris Ratcliffe (A): ZFS offers a number of benefits not currently seen in any filesystem including XFS, for more information, please go to: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/data_management.jsp Joe Miller (Q): What is Sun doing in the SOA space? Jeff McIver (A): Sun's Reference Architectures actually predate Service Oriented Architectures that are published and shared as "Sun Blueprints". Take a look at the numerous blueprints & reference architectures available at 'sun.com'. PeteK77 (Q): Why did Sun purchase Tarantella at this time? Jonathan Schwartz (A): To ensure our customers had simple, affordable access to Windows on Sun Ray - please read my blog on the subject (blogs.sun.com/jonathan) David (Q): There is a common perception that x86 hardware is cheaper than Sparc hardware but I find that comparing servers with similar features ussually finds the Sparc servers much less expensive. Is Sun doing anything to combat this misperception or will they more likely move to more and more x86 servers? John Fowler (A): We have constantly had to deal with this misperception problem. SPARC systems are much more scalable than x86 and therefore people see those prices and assume the low end is expensive as well. The reality is that we are competitively priced to value on both x86 and SPARC. The good news is that many of our customers are folks like you who look closely and make judgements on the basis of capabilities. TCP (Q): ?? Will we see a reduction in the cost of Sun Ray Bundles? John Loiacano (A): We will continue to look at both reducing cost of existing bundles as well as creating new offerings. With the pending acquisition of Tarantella, we have a number of new bundles that we will be able to offer shortly. PeteK77 (Q): How has the project with JP Morgan been going? Jonathan Schwartz (A): We have a ton of projects on-going with JP Morgan - and our overall relationship has never been stronger. So from my vantage point, it's going extremely well - and they're doing a wonderful job validating the return of Solaris to Wall Street (and the continuing displacement of our friends at Red Hat :) outlawsysadmin (Q): We have purchased serveral Opteron-based systems from Sun all running Solaris. When will Sun Management Center and SRS Netconnect be fully compatible with the Opteron line? Jim Sangster (A): In late summer the Sun N1 System Manager will be released and support discovery, monitoring, and managing of Sun x64 systems. The N1 System Manager will expand to support all Sun systems over time, and also includes some Sun MC functionality initially and expands to include the full depth of Sun MC monitoring and management. The Sun Management Connection will support the Opteron line at release. The Sun Update Connection will also support the Opteron line with Solaris 10 update 1, which replaces SRS Netconnect functionality. PeteK77 (Q): Any plans on selling Intel chips? John Fowler (A): We don't actually sell any chips per se - but I think your question is around whether we are going to sell systems that use Intel. We are committed to the best possible performance in our x86 line. AMD presently wins virtually every single performance benchmark and most recently with the introduction of dual-core for servers, has extended their performance advantage relative to power/heat by a factor of 3 to 1 over Intel. We will constantly evaluate Intel technology and incorporate them into the product line when and if they have a more competitive product. Go see benchmarks on various sites like anandtech.com, you'll see what I mean. Jonathan Hoopes (Q): Jonathan, you recently dinged Citrix's complicated licensing scheme. To be fair, Sun's own licensing program is in flux and Citrix has achieved critical mass with their virtualization technology. Was Microsoft support the only missing link to wider spread Sun Ray adoption and should we expect to see thin- client traction to increase in the near term, or is there more work to be done before users buy off on this paradigm. Jonathan Schwartz (A): Hopefully, our licensing scheme ($100/employee, infinite right to use) is relatively simple - we're hoping to extend that to Sun Ray (and, if/when we close, to Tarantella's technology). Granted, Citrix has generated critical mass - but they've helped stir interest in a market that now wants cheaper pricing, and simpler deployment. I'm hoping we can offer both (and that'll drive significanat incremental volume for Sun Ray). gentimjs (Q): with the open sourcing of solaris, do you plan to release hardware drivers as well? For example, open sourced drivers for the creator3d frame buffer which could be ported to linux, etc ? Glenn Weinberg (A): Our goal is to release as much of Solaris as open source as we can, including drivers. I don't know of current plans for Creator3d specifically, but we will look into that. gentimjs (Q): when i buy time on the compute grid what am i getting? do i get a shell login good for x hours, or do i run a local daemon on my local system which spreads the load to the grid? simplified question, but im sure you see what im asking. Bjorn Andersson (A): in the first verision of Pay Per Use SunGrid you will have a GUI that allows you to upload your job and build the command string to execute the job on the grid, after the job completes you will be able to download the results. in later releases we are looking at grid to grid connections. rajulal (Q): When will ZFS will be released officially? Chris Ratcliffe (A): ZFS is currently in Beta, feedback is very positive and we expect to deliver it in Solaris Express by the end of the year. We will deliver the final ZFS functionality in a future update to Solaris 10. jmvm59 (Q): There still appears to be some mixed signals with all the new Opteron based systems, if Sun really has a future committment to Sparc processors. John Fowler (A): Having both our own designed chips in highly integrated systems as well as using Opteron lets Sun cover every possible workload with competitive products - from the largest decision support systems to high performance computing clusters for floating point simulations. You will see very exciting new products using both over the next six months. We can also run Solaris across both, simplifying management for customers. amy (Q): Jonathan, at the DC Customer event, Scott mentioned that you now have 425,000 customers for the Enterprise Java stack and quite a few more in the pipeline. Can you comment on when the revenue from this part of your business will be significant to Sun? Jonathan Schwartz (A): It already is - bear in mind, 425,000 customers = 42.5M/year, which given the gross margin on software licenses, is already quite valuable. Now the challenege is getting that to $100M/yr... gentimjs (Q): im curious, with solaris going open source, and your agreement with MS, are you going to be doing any interopability stuff that you wont be able to open source with the rest of solaris? John Loiacano (A): The majority of work currently underway with Microsoft is about creating and publishing specifications. Our intent is to ensure that these are openly available. Implementations of these specs will be done by each company, or anyone else who adopts them. You will see more detail tomorrow at a joint press conference with Sun and Microsoft. jmvm59 (Q): While the web based event is good to introduce new products, do you see having a live event again like Sun Network where people can see the products and talk to the engineers all in one place. Something like Linux World or the events EMC and Veritas have each year to showcase new products. Jonathan Schwartz (A): Of course - we're continuing to plan on providing forums across the world to expose our products and technologies to the broadest market possible... topbannana (Q): Any recomendations on what laptop is best for Solaris 10/JDS? Glenn Weinberg (A): I'm biased since I love my Acer Ferrari. That said, check out the Hardware Compatibility List at http://www.bigadmin.com/hcl - over 160 laptops that work with Solaris are listed there. topbannana (Q): Jonathan, you say 'traditional desktop', what sort of desktop will come with solaris in the near future? Jonathan Schwartz (A): SunRay's will be backed by Solaris - and a growing number of other alternative clients. But I'm not particularly focused on displacing Microsoft from gaming machines or traditional enterprise computing - that market's already well served. It's the emergence of cheaper, easier to manage and maintain clients that we see as a growing opportunity for Solaris... Francois Bousquet (Q): Part of the Sun interoperability with Microsoft product, is there any plan of adding mountsmb feature to Solaris ? (Linux already have it with Samba's mountsmb) Chris Ratcliffe (A): Samba is included in Solaris 10 and fully supported by Sun. Can you be more specific? gentimjs (Q): will the USIV cpus be able to run linux? Andy Ingram (A): In the past, we offered a version of Linux on SPARC via the Sun Store. However, there was virtually no uptake of this product and the supplier stopped issuing a Linux port. Because of this lack if demand, we currently have no plans to produce our own Linux port for SPARC. Dorothy (Q): Question for Jonathan Schwartz- what is the first song you downloaded to your iPod? And do you think that eventually mobile devices will be able to tap into computing grids? Jonathan Schwartz (A): Calling All Angels, Jane Siberry. Showing my age. And certainly, mobile devices are already tapping into the grid - showing movies or offering ringtones for download. gentimjs (Q): a somewhat off topic question that i often wonder .. what does Johnathan have on his desk (for a comp) in his office at Sun? :-) Jonathan Schwartz (A): A beautiful SunRay 170, that generates no heat, no noise, and costs my employer pennies a day to operate... csc (Q): With regards to the Sun Compute Grid offering, any plans to offer Solaris Sparc? Jim Parkinson (A): yes we will have Sparc as part of the SunGrid offering! In fact today it is the engine behind the display grid. Carl (Q): I would like to know who is using JDS and if it is working? Jonathan Schwartz (A): Thousands of customers and individuals, along with every Solaris user (it's the default desktop). We've got banks and insurance companies, governments and telcos - it's a large and growing market for us. gerald (Q): When are UltraSparc IV+ processors expected to ship for the 25K? Andy Ingram (A): The US IV+ processors are on schedule and will ship in the second half of this calendar year. As always, you will be able to upgrade your existing 25K with these new processors and can mix and match them with your existing uniboards. TCP (Q): What is the future vision of Sun Ray Product Line, since the Taratella annoucement? John Fowler (A): Tarantella helps integrate a broad range of platforms in with the SunRay - most importantly, the ability to run Microsoft Windows applications side by side with Unix/Linux applications on the same SunRay screen. Tarantella has been a partner with us for some time and is deployed with many customers on SunRay already. Buying them lets us better integrate the software and offer it at very attractive pricing. amy (Q): What percentage of Sun customers do you expect to sign up for the new Sun Connection service? Does it cost a significant premium over other forms of support? Steve Gardner (A): It'll be shipped by default with all Solaris instances - so by definition, the 1.4M (or so) license downloads will all be opt'ed-in to the Sun Connection - and similarly, all systems shipped by Sun and our OEM's, as well. And every J2SE running on Windows is already opt'ed in :) - and those numbers measure in the 10's of millions! gentimjs (Q): i like the work that was done with gnome in JDS3/Solaris10 .. any plans for better KDE support? Glenn Weinberg (A): We currently include KDE with Solaris 10 for SPARC. The Solaris KDE developer is a member of the OpenSolaris pilot community and is currently working on the Solaris for x86 port, so we expect excellent KDE support moving forward. dare (Q): is Sun collaborating with Microsoft in this area(Network Computing)? John Loiacano (A): Absolutely. You should see a great deal of detail as soon as tomorrow, when Scott and Steve Balmer host a joint press conference and outline progress. This will include a few demonstrations and not just slideware. gentimjs (Q): any plans to release the remainder of the info on VIS and such so that non-redhat linux distros can run thier kernels on USIII cpus? or is my info out of date? Mike and Tim (A): Sun has provided technical details on UltraSPARC-III to Dave Miller and others working on the Linux SPARC port. In addition, as part of the forthcoming release of OpenSolaris, significantly more information relevant to OS ports in the form of source code will become available. David (Q): Do you have anymore information on working with Oracle licensing on multi-core processors? Andy Ingram (A): Oracle, along with other software vendors who license based upon CPU cores, are facing a challenge from the current and next generation of multi-core processors. In addition, the continued advances of system virtualization further blur the delineations of what constitutes a core or processor. Over time, they will need to find a new metric to assess the value they deliver to their customers. While it is not my place to comment on Oracle's plans, I can say we are working closly with Oracle to keep them abreast of changes in technology. gintas (Q): What is the state of OpenSolaris as of today? John Loiacano (A): DTrace is available today. The remaining portions of Solaris will be available sometime next month. Jason Fiset (Q): when will project Janus be available via Solaris 10 or Software express? Jonathan Schwartz (A): Technology preview is this month... then we'll collect feedback, and get it shipping ASAP. Francois Bousquet (Q): When should we except to have a release of ZFS and Linux compatibility for Solaris 10 ? Chris Ratcliffe (A): ZFS is currently in Beta. We have received positive feedback from the Beta testers. We still have some finishing work to do, and then ZFS will be made available through Software Express for Solaris, and subsequently in an Update release of Solaris 10. We are about to release a technology preview of the Linux Application Environment for Solaris, with the goal of getting customer feedback on the best approach to this complex problem. We will use that feedback to design a solution that we intend to deliver in an Update of Solaris 10. ramana (Q): Apart from corporate markets, Are you planning to target normal consumer market (everyday Internet user), with Grid Computing solution? I eally feel there are big bucks there. It is a quantity and subscription powered market for sure. If yes, How are you planning to target such consumers? Do you see a growth/revenue opportunity there? Jim Parkinson (A): yes we will have grid services for pay per use on the internet. We do agree that this a potential growth market. We will have a secure user interface on internet. keep watching Sun.com for it's release. gentimjs (Q): any plans for ms active directory SSO support for solaris? I'd -really- like to see something in the solaris MC to "check off" to enable MSAD login support .. it would help me sell my boss on solaris .. Andy Tucker (A): Stay tuned for Friday's announcements... which will (At least partially) target this very area... mh31n1612 (Q): Although sun has a different class completely ,but sir,do you think will any of the unix based operating systems be able to beat microsoft in the near future as far as the sales and the popularity go? Jonathan Schwartz (A): It depends upon the market - do I believe we can beat Microsoft on the traditional desktop, no - but that's not our core market. Can we beat them in the service infrastructure, and emerging client space? ABSOLUTELY! Moderator: Welcome to the NC05Q2 Executive Chat. Please send in your questions. Francois Bousquet (Q): With new S-ATA hard drives getting more performant, is Sun having any plans on releasing a server with local S-ATA disks, probably on x86 ? John Fowler (A): We're not announcing products here, but in general we are also excited about the directions in S-ATA and you will see us incorporate these drives into products for both SPARC and Opteron. Stay tuned. |