Oct 14th, 2007
Sun CEC 2007
Once a year Sun Microsystems invites select engineers and partners to its Customer Engineering Conference to share tons of information with each other. It was my first time going and it was pretty good.
The theme this year was Red Shift/Green Shift. The basic premise of Red Shift is that computing and data storage growth is exploding and there are companies riding this wave that are growing much faster than normal economic and computing trends. The Green Shift has to do with the rise of eco-responsibility.
Sun is positioning themselves to take advantage of this growth with the new Niagara 2 CMT (chip multi-threading) processors they have out as well as the forthcoming Rock processor. We were treated to a pretty cool public launch of the T5120, T5220 and T6320 servers. On the software side, things are progressing along very nicely with Solaris 10. Best thing about it all is that almost all of their software is opensource so anyone can take advantage of the R&D they’re doing.
Now on to my experiences… I sat through a number of really interesting sessions. Most notable was called “Web 2.0 – The Nitty Gritty” by Tim Bray, “A reference architecture for Web 2.0″ by Shanti Subramanyam and “Concerning Capacity” by Bob Sneed. Unfortunately there were tons of other sessions I missed out on that did deep dives into DTrace which amazing for developers who need to look at what their code is doing.
Tim Bray was very engaging and it was good to hear him talk about the state of web development today and how Ruby on Rails makes sense for a lot of people. He also talked about how software development is changing because of the time to market with things like Rails. Enterprise software development will be headed this way too.
Shanti’s talk discussed the state of affairs with scalable database intensive apps like Webkinz, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and the list goes on. A lot of it comes down to understanding how applications interact with their infrastructure and building out accordingly. Things touched on were caching, proxying, webservers and differences between packages out there.
Bob Sneed had a couple of amazing sessions that all seemed to revolve around capacity and performance. He talked in depth about the right way and the wrong way to diagnose issues. One thing every manager, software developer and system admin should know is that cpu utilization and system load are not accurate indicators of performance. Always, always, always work off an SLA. People end up dumping money on hardware without realizing what they’re doing. This topic deserves another post later.
On the social side, I got to meet a lot of my Sun friends who I’ve known for a little while on Twitter and meet tons of new people. It was a great time and the party at the Palms wasn’t too bad. If you ever get an opportunity to go and you’re interested in Sun technology, go. If you want to read more about this year’s CEC then hop over to blogs.sun.com and search for CEC.
Update: Pictures taken by Shawn Ferry here.