No I wasn’t reading Stephen Hawkin’s book last evening to have inspired myself to post a blog on topics in astrophysics. The Big Bang talks about the ever expanding Universe, our Universe. Our Universe– That’s the central theme of the first day of CEC 2007.
When I first read about Project Blackbox, the whole idea seemed very exciting and promising. Today I got to see a Project Blackbox in the Pavilion where breakfast was served. Trust me, it looks awesome. If you are a customer, who wants to cut down the cost of data center operations, you might want to consider buying one of those Project Blackbox. It looks compact (by the way, it is a data center and not a high end server; hence the word compact) and it looks cool.
Breakfast was followed by the General Session. As we got into the venue for the general session, we could hear music in the background. The lighting wasn’t bright (intentional). The hall had the capacity to hold all of us(as many as 4000 attendees), which was great.
Before the host of CEC 2007 took the stage, some artists performed a mime on Sun’s role in the ever expanding market.
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The Master of Ceremony had no problems whatsoever in capturing the attention of the audience. He did so by showing us all a funny video. He shared with a stunning statitics of a hundred attentees getting Sun Certified on a Sunday (there is a prometric center set up at CEC 2007 as I mentioned here) and is counting. As his speech progressed, he began to talk about some serious and interesting stuff and his main focus of talk revolved around the new product cetwo (Customer Engineer 2.0). What shall I say? Once in place, cetwo is THE most convenient system to get to the informaton (or rather the information gets to us). It could be treated as a one stop place where the information is aggregated from various locations (internal to Sun as well as external web sites) and is displayed on a single page. This technology is not site centric, but user centric. Aggregated information (useful ones) arrives at the users desktop. Isn’t that cool?
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The next couple of speakers spoke about the innovations that Sun has done and the pace at which Sun is growing. Growth was the primary theme of one of the speeches and the gist of the other talk was Sun’s wide array of products to the market and speed at which it is being launched.
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It was Marc’s turn next and he spoke eloquently about the roadmap of Processors that’s Sun is planning. Boy, isn’t he coming up with an amazing set of products that will raise the bar so high that Sun’s competitors would take years to catch up with its Processor product line. His words, “I have been working with Sun for the last 16 years and I have never been so optimistic about the prospects of Sun ever as I am now,” summed up his vision on the product line that he is in charge of.
I am putting up here, what Marc showed us during his concluding words:
* We picked the right direction
* We are ahead
* We will be ahead for a few years
* We are working on the next big things
* We will succeed as a system company
Have a look at the picture below and guess what’s it all about:
Those are the questions raised by the viewers to the speakers. It popped up in a webpage and Marc patiently answered some of them. You could use pages, instant messengers and even E-mails to shoot questions to the presenter. Some Thanks Giving messages also came up for Marc.
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In came a legend, quite calm and serene, drooping his head down, bearing a charming smile, talking soft about Sun’s plan on Intel and AMD boxes. This is the same man, who gave away Hundred Thousand dollars to ,Larry and Sergey to start up a company which we now know as Google Inc. He bears the Employee No. 1 at Sun and he’s the man behind Sun Constellation System, Sun’s answer to Super Computing. Andreas Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun, needs no introduction. He spoke about about Sun Blades, HPC and towards the end a little about corrupt data (basically about the advantage of using ZFS). Andy answered quite a few questions and there was a touch of humour in the way he answered some of them. Felt great to watch some great people on the stage, live.
Good start to the Customer Engineering Conference 2007.
suncec2007