I just bumped into the Sun BluePrints Wiki and I think it is worth a visit. It is a companion to the BluePrints Blog and part of the move towards Self-Published Content at Sun, which increases agility and responsiveness to user's needs.

The Recent Content page lists chronologically the latest changes. The more recent entries are created in Wiki format, while the earlier ones are PDF attachments.

Some of the documents that caught my attention include:

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 length movies - take your pick, some data has to be perfect. Not a decimal point or pixel out of place.

That's exactly why, years …

Just a quick note: Kickfire is not based on SSD (solid-state device) hard drives. Their old website says “SQL goes solid state” but that just means SQL in hardware, not SSD.

When I was a child, we had a Sears Lady Kenmore clothes washing machine that boasted “solid-state circuits” on the panel, in flowery script writing. It was not based on SSD, either.

Finally, I am not on the Kickfire payroll. I’m not getting anything from working with them, except perhaps the fun of being in their labs while they’re still in stealth mode. It’s a harder balance than you might think, writing about a product that I don’t know about and am excited to learn about, and sounding objective. If I’m sounding like a fanboy, I don’t mean to. Trust me, if it’s vaporware you’ll hear it here first.

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