SunCEC2007 Day 2: Niagara 2 Systems launch

I wrote many entries about Niagara2 in the past and will write much about the systems when i´m back home in Germany (in the meantime Allan Packers link list is a really god start). So i won´t write about the systems now. Nevertheless i want to write about the event itself. It was really cool launch. As far as i know it was the only launch (at last since i work for Sun) in front of 4000 peoples with at least half of them wearing “I love Solaris”-tshirts. Jonathan made an excellent keynote before and so it was a kind of a special atmosphere that surrounded the event. The event started with the usual presentation about the advantages of the new systems hold by John Fowler. Then Andy B. and Rick Hetherington (lead of the N2 development) joined the stage and the real metal was presented. And this metal is really cool. 64 Threads. 64 Gigabytes. There was a Constellation-chassis full of T6230 blades. Doesn´t sound impressive.? This rack contains 48 blades. 3072 Gigabytes of memory in one rack. 3072 threads in one rack. I find this really cool. After testimonials from Ichiro Hirose of Fujitsu and Jason Turner of Mediastile, John talked about the six records on benchmarks (ranging from specjbb over specweb to specfp) and led to the Q&A session. Andy B. made on of the best comments when he answered the question about the Oracle Licensin with “There are several opsn-source databases out there which runs really good on this systems”. He got instant applause for this comment. I assume, that many colleagues share my opinion about Oracle (“incredible expensive, political pricing and unneeded for many databases”). So … it was a really cool event. I think it would be a good idea to keep this way to announce such groundbreaking products. There is no better auditorium for such announcement than 4000 engineers. Maybe we can get even more ecstatic as the Apple folks when we announce Rock and Supernova ;) The systems would deserve it … PS: I don´t know if i´m correct, but i thing we´ve offically announced Project Etude (Solaris 8 container on Solaris 10) yesterday on one slide. It´s called Solaris 8 Migration Assistant.