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Mir ist beim Lesen im Blog der werten Frau Fragmente ein Stein vom Herzen gefallen. Meine merkwürdige Affinität zu Flughäfen scheint kein Einzelfall zu sein. Es scheint noch andere zu geben ...

Ich erwische mich in letzter Zeit öfters dabei, einfach zum Flughafen zu fahren und mich oben mit einem Muffin (nur die hellen) und einem Kaffee hinzusetzen, um den Flugzeugen nachzugucken ... ich weiss leider nicht, was mich an Flughäfen anzieht ... Fernweh, sich weggrübeln, das Menschenkino, das hier in epischer Breite gezeigt wird, die Betriebsamkeit ... vielleicht auch einfach nur diese Akkumulation von Technik ... aber bestimmt nicht wegen den Promotionkräften, die einen jedesmal zum Erwerb einer Kreditkarte einladen wollen ...

At this time in seven days, i will be at the Sun Customer Engineering Conference 2007 in Las Vegas, and i´m starting to prepare things the travel for the event. Yesterday my FTL card arrived, so this may fasten up things a little bit at the checkin and the security.

In an attempt of insanity, i´ve scheduled a customer meeting late at friday in Berlin. Thus i fly from Berlin instead of Hamburg. Is quite a trip this time: From Berlin to Frankfurt, from Frankfurt to Denver (hey, my first flight in a A340-600) and from there to Las Vegas. And on the backhaul from Vegas to San Francisco, from San Francisco to Frankfurt and then back to Berlin.

I´ve spend almost all miles in my account to get a business class upgrade for the leg between SFO and FRA. But until now, they didn´t want my miles: No confirmation so far. I assume this will be a quite awful trip back as the last time: With 1,92cm any known economy seat in any known airline is just to small (things will be better in A380 as far as i know, but this doesn´t help next saturday). I hope, that i´m able to gather a exit row seat or it´s likely that my mood will be abyssimal when arriving ...

PS: I even finally found my passport last week but now my appartment looks like after a bomb explosion.

Wenn man die Planung fuer eine Reise macht, denkt man "Ach, vier Stunden sind doch nicht so lang. Das Meeting dauert eh laenger und ansonsten kann man ja immer noch am Flughafen arbeiten." Und nimmt man für den Rückflug doch ein verbliebenes Ticket. Man will ja sparen und für die preisliche Differenz könnte man mit einem anderen Angebot des gleichen Carriers auch nach New York fliegen. Es passiert am Ende wie es passieren muss. Termin ist sehr puenktlich beendet, keine Schlange bei der Rückgabe des Leihwagens. Die Schlange an der Security ist gerade zwei Personen lang. Das Unheil hat seinen Lauf genommen: Es ist siebzehn Uhr und ich sitze am Gate. Mist.



Also arbeiten. Nun ... das war so geplant, als mein Powerbook noch nicht im Himmel für altgediente Elektronik weilte. Mein neues Apple-Notebook (privat beschafft) ist noch nicht da. Jetzt fällt boese auf, das bei meinem für Solaris-Spielereien gekaufen Notebook die WLAN-Karte noch nicht mal von Linux unterstützt wird. Arbeiten ... geht also auch nicht. Und jetzt merkt man ploetzlich das vier Stunden sehr lang werden können.

I wrote several times in this blog, that the innovations of Linux aren't technical ones. Linux is a social phenomenon, not a technical one. Now, Paul Murphy wrote a similar opinion in his blog at zdnet: Is Linux innovative?. From my view, Linux on x86 is the triumph of good-enough. It's good enough to be a webserver, it's good enough to be a mailserver, it's good enough for being a datacenter server. It's not really good at it, but it's capable to run 80% of all unixoid tasks sufficiently when you ignore some problems (like RAS being an afterthought in x86 or the inherent problems of storing data on rotating rust)

The marketing problem: Linux get a good market share in areas with the general suspicion of "beeing innovative" like HPC. Fanboys and media digest this image without further thinking and tout it into the world. The problem: The reality isn't so simple. In HPC Linux is little more than a glorified bootloader and device driver for small nodes (the ability to scale on such cluster has nothing to do with the Linux kernel, it's the merit of the application programming frameworks and fast network (like IB) )

PS: This paragraph made my day ....

Similarly people will argue that Linux scales better than anything else. They’ll point, for example, at SGI’s Linux super computers - but those aren’t SMP machines, they’re multi-processor grids in boxes; and, by that logic the world CPU scaling crown would have to go to Microsoft: for botnet, a wanabe grid entirely enabled by Microsoft Windows.

Ashlee Vance wrote a nice article about our x86 story:It's time to pay attention to Sun's x86 server biz

For Sun, the X4450 could be a bigger deal in that gives burly x86 customers a reason to check out what Sun has to offer across the board. For a company still just ramping up its x86 business, that’s a pretty big deal.

Infoworld did an really positive review about the Sun Blade 6000 Modular Server in "Sun's newest server: Dynamite comes in small packages":

Overall, however, testing across the three blade architectures showed solid performance at every level, and the quad-core Intel blades are obviously perfect for virtualization.

Paul, wait for the UltraSPARC T2 based balde ... this will be real dynamite

Rick Hetherington was in Munich today ... he gave a good presentation into the future of CMT SPARC and what we will see in the near and the middle term. Many people have the opinion, that Sparc will see it´s end soon, especially after the announcement of TI to stop investments in new process technologies. The direct opposite is true, more than ever. I was quite impressed. Unfortunately it´s not up to me to disclose things.

My coworker Dirk Wriedt had some problems with an application at a customer site. Dtrace told him soon, that the application used some libary call in an incorrect way. Normally you would wait some days for a patch for the application. But DTrace can do more for you: dtrace in destructive mode: working around a non-working syscall. Well, it´s certainly a nasty hack from the "don´t do this at home"-department, but ... well ... it seemed to work and it saved the progress of the project until the patch was available.

Nice article about consolidation with Solaris Containers - Sun shop stays loyal with Solaris Containers:

So Kichler found another option. Thanks to a backward compatibility feature in Solaris 10, he discovered that Kichler could still run legacy versions of its BEA and PeopleSoft applications in a container while the IT department tested newer versions. "The business really wants to get to the latest version of PeopleSoft, and Containers give us a lot of flexibility to create dev and test environments that we'll use for now, then throw away," Sink said.

The Inquirer points to an interesting fact: Itanium shined thru absence on this years IDF.The whole Itanium story looks like a collection of maybes.

First off, Itanium. It has been relegated to the niche of high availability, maybe Poulson will change this, maybe it won't, but until then, times are going to be tough. This was clearly (not) stated in the keynotes, I attended five of the six, and the word Itanium was not mentioned once.

At the end the further development of x86 (or x64 to be exact) closed the market for high-end Itanium processors. It can't execute x86 reasonably well and the software support ist not even near the Power/AIX range. Thus besides of highly specialized tasks there is no real market for the processor. The question ist: How long Intel will pay for a project, that started with high hopes it wasn't able to fullfil.

The announcements of our new Xeon servers wasn't not only an announcement of systems with a new processor architecture. It was the announcement of a new chassis. Thus chassis enabled us to build the smallest Xeon based 4-proc server (at least from Tier1-vendors, perhaps there is an uncoolable whitebox somewhere in asia ). The biggest critic point is solved, as you can see on the photos ... more than enough hard disks (8 for both, to be exact).

So, welcome to the new chassis:
X4450

X4150