c0t0d0s0.org

This is a trend i´ve recognizing for a while now: Companies stopped to migrate to Linux for the migrations sake. I think it´s a combination of Solaris 10 (as i wrote several time: the tenth version rescued the Solaris franchise), the consequence of several burned fingers with Linux and some people that doesn´t take this "Linux is cheaper" meme for granted and use their own pencil and calculator.

The Computerworld writes about this tendency in Replacing high-end Unix with enterprise Linux? Not so fast:

As Qualcomm's director of IT, Matthew Clark was part of the team that reviewed the Linux option. The company's ratio of administrators to users is currently 500-to-1 (although he plans to lower that to about 450-to-1). "With Linux, it would have been 150- or 175-to-1. We would have had to hire three additional administrators for every administrator we have right now working on Unix," Clark says.

Another Solaris user states in the same article:

"We won't be as aggressive in replatforming to Linux as we initially thought," he says. But, he adds, "we feel that both platforms will have a place in our infrastructure."

A really interesting read.

I wrote at the article about this aviation video, that Volker hit me at two weak points. Good music is one of them. And the music in this video is simply great. Luckly a commentor in Volkers blog wrote the name of this great artist. The woman writing and performing this music is Amy MacDonald. It´s good to hear such music to get remembered about the fact that there is still music in the world of commercial music dominated by guaranteed talent-free products of casting shows.

I strongly suggest to listen to the music: Suggestion for a first try are Footballer´s Wife(definitely the best on the album), This Much is True or L.A. from her album This is the life.

PS: Its one of the sure signs of getting old when the music you like is from persons younger than yourself. This musician is just 21 years old.

I´ve thought about linking to all this people writing articles about "What Sun should do now?". But at the end most of this articles are written with no background knowledge or with an hidden agenda. So i simply decided not to link to this articles at all.

But there is an article i want to comment. Rich Sharples writes in What Sun Should Do:

#3 Solaris
See above. Linux has won. Whatever technical merit Solaris has today will be commoditized next year. The innovation around Linux is relentless.

Next year ... really? ZFS is available for years now. I don´t see it´s commoditization by any technology in Linux at the moment. Same thing for DTrace. No SSD support besides of simply using it as a faster disk.

And i know, all those Linux people will cry "Foul" but i do not really see innovation in the Linux kernel. Having many hardware drivers in the kernel isn´t an innovation. Commoditization and innovation are diametral concepts. Linux is good in commoditization, it´s the master in the field of good enough. But it fails in the field of innovating. And to get interesting technologies (besides of drivers) Linux need strong competitors. We don´t stand still. There are other interesting technologies in their creation that will gives us a good technological lead.

By the way. To understand Mr. Sharples standpoint you should know, that he is "Director, Product Management at Red Hat". What a strange luck that he suggests to drop products that could hurt his employer. I tend to say this is a kind of hidden agenda.

From my perspective, Sun has just to learn one thing: Learning to kick the butts of our competitors with their good enough products and learning to make more money from our innovations. But: You don´t make money by dropping them.

The days of the Minority report alike GUIs getting nearer - gadget application by gadget application. FluidTunes (written by Majic Jungle Software) for example allows you to control your iTunes with gestures in front of your iSight:

Vowe got me at my two weak points with linking to this video: aircrafts and good music. I can look at such videos for hours:



PS: Perhaps i should really thinking about learning to fly. I´m asked about that by colleagues, friends and readers in quite a regular manner. But at the moment i´m glad that i´ve lost my fear of flying.

An commentator at this article stated, that you don´t have redundant I/O servers. My colleague Martin Mueller pointed me at the Immersion Week to a fact that i wasn´t really aware of (albeit it´s obvious when you read the documentation, i just didn´t really thought about this topic): It´s perfectly possible to configure a redundant I/O domain with LDOMS (albeit there it´s not possible on every LDOMS capable server)

Most of the UltraSPARC T-class based systems have multiple PCIe busses. It´s a valid configuration to boot up two I/O domains and giving both of them one of the PCIe busses. When one of the I/O domains fails, it´s still capable to use services reachable by the other domain. There is even a good blueprint about such configurations - LDOMs I/O Best Practices: Data Reliability with Logical Domains

PS: This is one of the two things i´ve learned in Jena. About the other thing i´m not allowed to talk ... the "Stay tuned" in Jonathans talk at CEC makes much more sense now ...

Für die Immersion Week habe ich meine Security-Präsentation ein wenig aufgewertet und erweitert. Hier ist die neue Version:

(click here for pdf)
Ich habe unter anderem mehr Erlaeuterungen und Neuentwicklungen eingebaut. An anderen stellen habe ich Glenn Brunettes Security Deep Dive fuer weitere Beispiele gepluendert. Glenns Präsentation ist wirklich gut (allerdings auf Englisch). Ich empfehle unbedingt die Lektüre.

I wasn´t ill last week nor i´ve lost the drive to blog last week.

I was really busy with listening at day and create/pimp presentations in the evening. Last week was the Immersion Week of Sun Germany. Immersion Week (iwsungy) ? The iwsungy was an event for the technical people in presales. 5 days full of presentations and workshops. Information exchange galore. I think, we have to thank Winnie and Detlef for this event. It was really great. I´ve learned a thing or two, and i hope the listeners of my presentations learned a thing or two, too.

I´m on my way home now.Major blogging activities will resume tomorrow morning ...

The delays at the 787 program hide a little bit the delays at another important programm of Boeing. The regenerated 747 will be delayed, too 747-8 schedule undone by 787 crisis, management errors . Stephen Trimble writes in his article:

Boeing shifted the delivery date for the 747-8 Freighter to Cargolux from late 2009 to the third quarter of 2010. First delivery of the 747-8 Intercontinental, a passenger variant struggling to attract orders, dropped from late 2010 to the second quarter of 2011.

and

The flight-test phase is now allotted between seven and nine months to complete, Teal says. By comparison, Boeing completed the flight-test programme for the 777-200LR, a perhaps less ambitious derivative programme, in about 10 months in 2005.

At just 20 (+8 for Boeing Business Jet as a customer) orders for the 747-8 but 78 for the freighter i wouldn´t be suprised a lot if see more delays for the passenger variant to help the 747-8F. It´s like in computer engineering ... given a fixed number of engineering cyles you have to find an economical sensible distribution.

The problem with faulty (without anticorrosion plating) nutplates just got bigger. James Wallace writes in "Faulty parts on all Boeing jets":

Those nonconforming nutplates that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago are on all Boeing jets, not just the 737. But there are far fewer on the 747, 777 and 767 than are on the 737. Still, Boeing said Tuesday that they must all be found and replaced before any more planes are delivered.

I assume, those faulty nutplates are in already delivered aircrafts, too.

Funny discussion about boot-up times of pSeries systems:

Hey, I manage 7 p595 squadrons and they are all different. For the most part, the startup time depends on the amount of I/O you have installed. Two of mine are 3 frame p595's with 64 hba, 64 nic, about 20 internal HDD, dual power systems and I think 10 d20 I/O drawers. These servers take about 90 minutes just to initialise the hardware, not including starting any LPAR's. So tell your friend that this is normal and take a good book and a really large coffee with him each time he needs a restart