I thought I'd share a note I sent earlier in the week to Sun's leaders - about the turmoil we're seeing in the markets, and how I want our team focusing their efforts.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Begin forwarded message:
From: Jonathan Schwartz
Date: September 30, 2008 12:02:29 AM PDT
To: All Sun
Subject: Headlines, Financial Crisis, etc.

You can't have missed today's headlines - the American Congress failed to pass a critical bill authorizing the Treasury to put a floor under the US banking sector. The market swooned, and politicians in the US, and across the world, are bickering over the right long term

Recently I am been testing few pieces of Storage projects of OpenSolaris with PostgreSQL. One of tests involves using an iSCSI disk  with PostgreSQL.  Unfortunately the storage that's available is  in Colorado  while my PostgreSQL server is  located in Massachusetts. Latency will definitely be one of my top problems since storage  is halfway across the country (in Colorado). Plus the fact that I will be running a database server on my end  doesn't really sound like a good idea. Come to think about it, this could be a more common problem nowadays since Cloud Storage (for example Amazon S3 Webservice ) could be  optimistically  half way across the country and pessimistically be on the other side of the world.

 So what are my options to solve such

It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).

One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity

There are only two kinds of storage devices - those that have failed, and those that are about to fail. That's the view most datacenters have about the traditionally mechanical devices pejoratively referred to as "spinning rust." All disk drives fail, cheap drives fail faster.

If the average time to fail is five years, you and your laptop can make do with the occasional backup. But when an average enterprise has 100, or 1,000, or increasingly 10,000 or 100,000 individual disk drives, failure is a daily, if not hourly occurrence. Mechanical devices fail.

And with failure comes the potential for losing data - using commodity disks to save your boss $500,000 does her no good if she's fined $50,000,000 for violating data retention regulations. Stock transactions, medical images or feature

We announced the first commercial release of OpenSolaris - targeting high speed developers and development teams (not consumers...). OpenSolaris focuses on developers wanting to be freed from proprietary software models, who see innovation and automation in operating systems as a source of competitive advantage.

If Solaris 10, OpenSolaris's older brother, is for IT departments prioritizing carrier grade stability over rapid innovation, OpenSolaris targets the exact opposite - developers, from high performance computing to social networking, that prioritize a constantly refreshing repository filled with community innovations (and ZFS-based automated

I can understand why they're upset - when Linux first came on the scene in Sun's core market, there were some here who responded the same way, asking "who can we sue?" But seeing the future, we didn't file an injunction to stop competition - instead, we joined the free software community and innovated.

One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money - and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering - and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies. As is all free innovation, at some level.