Dibbler's Net

From the NY Times Story it looks like IBM buyout of Sun is off the table. With that comes new rumors of Cisco, HP or Dell buying the company. The question is why ? Looking at the quarterly statements I don’t see where Sun is going to go bankrupt. They are showing growth in their hardware business since last year which is based on the fact that Sun hardware is now cost comparable to their competition and in some cases the hardware is better. Sun also introduced ZFS for fie systems. With this they introduced their new storage line. I have seen enough storage products to say that this is something Sun has done right and done very well. Now give them time to capitalize on these items. Any competitor that wants to buy Sun right now is doing it to end competition with them not to enhance or grow these products.

So now is the time where I end the Fanboy bit above. Am I a die hard Fanboy that believes Sun can do no wrong ? Of course not. Any large company will have problems and will have issues. However I am a technical person. I like the software and hardware. I am also all about the most bang for the buck. When people ask why I am using a Sun server and OS over windows and VMware it’s an easy argument based on cost. The HP, or Dell server may be marginally cheaper but then you have software costs. The OS, along with VMware is a massive initial and ongoing cost compared to Solaris OS and LDOM’s with Zones. Where I am the fanboy is in the people and the pricing. For a majority of products Sun charges either nothing, or a flat cost fee. This is the software purchase structure I believe in. As someone who has written and sold software I have always despised the user based or CPU based pricing model. The software takes a set number of hours to code and then maintain, why does the number of users I have or the cpu’s in the box change the cost ? I would really like if software vendors would end this charade. The sales technique they are working on is that if you have more users or CPU’s then you have more money so give them more. How we as consumers ever allowed this cost cycle to exist in software is beyond me. But that is what bothers me most about many other vendors and what I find relaxing about buying from Sun. It reminds me of how small software companies work that don’t have lawyers for sales reps. When I buy my tv I don’t get charged for how many people live in my house and are going to watch it so why is software so drastically different ?

Innovation is the other area where Sun in many ways reminds me of Google. One of the few large companies out there where I see new ideas coming out. New hardware and software that is truly new in design and thinking. Got some time, go read up on ZFS and the drastic changes to thinking it really is when talking about disk formatting. It’s what Microsoft wanted it’s new file system to be but they never figured that out. When you look across the Sun hardware line going back 2 years you see real changes not the same chasis with bigger hard drives that you see from the others. Why is it that Google, Sun, and Apple have figured out how to innovate and in reality motivate their consumers and so many other companies have failed so horribly. I am happy to hear that for a little while at least Sun will not be changing and the many employees there can continue with the good work they are doing.

The last part is that of corporations and how they are harming us. Growing up everyone’s parents worked at a company and had done so for 10,20,30 years. Companies actually lasted and people believed in their name and legacy. It saddens me how now companies are nothing more than colored cards when playing life. They are a commodity traded by the CEO’s and with names that change a day after bad news hits. What happened to a company being a business for the right reasons. A business is something where you are there to serve your customers, produce happy employees, and be a partner in your community, state, country and world. The sham of an individual investor having any part to do with a company, and a company having any respect for it’s investors is just sad. Many people say that as a generation ages they always complain that the next generation lacks respect. This is a strange time where to me our elder generation and their abuse of the companies they manage is a far worse disrespect than the kid who forgets to say thank you.

Derrick

Found this through the Sun Blogs Award Winners.

Now reading through the winners there are some great submissions. One of these really grabbed my interest. Everyone seems to be working towards a LAMP, AMP, or other package of all you need. These packages normally give you Apache, Mysql, PHP, and some other tools in an easy to install and use setup. The one that I was drawn to was the one called Cayac (details here)

Cherokee - http://www.cherokee-project.com/
    Maybe I am out of touch, but I have not heard of cherokee before this. Overall I really like the idea that this project is working towards. There is always a better mouse trap, and in this case a different web server. We are all very very used to apache. We can do apache configs in our sleep and there is a module for apache to do everything but wash dishes. Cherokee looks like it’s taken that idea and focused it into a specific application for doing the generic work of serving web pages. Apache always works but sometimes it takes real time to get compiled just the way you need it. Also in this day and age anytime you can simplify management it makes support and deployment easier.

Now back to Cayac. Cayac is a nice package for Solaris that gives you Cherokee, MySQL, PHP 5, and phpMyAdmin all in one easy to use package. This makes your initial server setup for that quick application that much easier. I currently have a small quick setup project that needs a quick backend and simple setup. I plan to give this a try and see how it works. At the same time I am very happy to see that people are working to create and improve on those things we think of as staples in our environment. With competition comes better software for everyone. Congratulations to the Cayac team and thanks to Sun for making money available to opensource projects.

At the same time I must plug blogs.sun.com. There are specific Sun Blogs that I read all the time, but from the blogs site you can see all posts and quickly see what is new at Sun and what is hot based on how many entries you see for the same information.

Derrick

It was only a matter of time but the next evolution in the desktop is here with DesktopTwo. Sponsored by Sun this new free service gives you a virtual desktop.

* Caveat. With all cloud services you need to balance the service vs the risk of having your data on someone else’s systems.

I signed up and logged in. Besides the requirement for Flash this service works really well. The display is clean and the apps are useful and full featured. I will spend some more time to see just how ready and willing I am to move to this type of thing but this would be a nice jump in technology from where remote desktop is today and remote computing for the office workforce. Once we are able to completely move back to a dumb terminal / server option we will not have completed our full circle back to mainframe based computing as things were when I started. I am very interested in how this completion of the computing technology cycle will open a new wave of client /server and client computing in the next circle of technology advancements.

I was also very pleases to see that the parent company Sapotek have not only made this open for development of new apps but they have made the whole system open which means you can run this as your internal desktop system using any assortment of web client machines. With the requirement to be on Windows, or Mac, or Linux no longer there and only a base requirement for bandwidth and a browser we will see less dependecny on the big OS makers and more control by the corporate IT departments. Most people would say that this is bad but in my mind it isn’t. Back with dumb terminals and mainframe’s security truly was easier. When you are dealing with the app security and not every desktop it does help to simplify and reduce the burden of work. The old adage used to be that any system could pass C2 requirements, all you needed to do was remove the network card, video card, keyboard, and lock it in a room. Once that was done you had one of the most secure OS’s around. It may seem like a joke but the reality is there. The less doors and windows on a house the easier it is to secure those few entry points. The less software or desktop machines the easier it will be to not have your data breach end up on the front page of the local news. Please do not take this to say that Cloud Desktops are the answer to security. I don’t mean that at all. I just see that the cycle coming back around to dumb terminal and mainframe (server) systems has some ability to simplify one aspect of a security model.

So go to their website, sign up and give it a try.

D~