I thought I’d spend a few minutes outlining the model behind our new Sun Connection offering, which launched February 2006.
Basic jist . . . Sun Connection allows customers to manage thousands of Solaris, Red Hat & Suse systems as easily as managing a single system. It provides simple provisioning, intelligent patching and data center auditing and reporting.
SC has a Dish Network-like model. Customers purchase update and provisioning channels (e.g.– Solaris 9 Update Channel or Red Hat 3 Provisioning Channel). As part of our SLA we add new major versions of a platform within 30 days of release (Red Hat 5 is just around the corner).
Check out the Sun Connection site on BigAdmin if you’re interested in learning more or sign up for a webinair.

Tags:
Sun Microsystems
Software
Systems Management
Sun Connection

I’ve been spending a lot of time this week thinking about open source and systems management. I think there is a tremendous opportunity for Sun to play a role in this space and help drive the development of a unified open platform. I think there are a number of innovative offerings in the open source space, but the solutions I’ve seen don’t necessarily have the scale and feature breadth to support a broad range of customers (from start-up to enterprise).
The pickle facing companies that have the breadth and scale to offer a comprehensive systems management platform is that the offerings are typically closed, fragmented and difficult to deploy — three traits that don’t lend very well towards building volume and community. In my mind whoever can develop an offering that is open, unified, scalable, easy to deploy, and has features that are “good enough” will have a tremendous opportunity to build a large community and drive volume.
Check out the map below to see the growing list of open source systems management supporters at the Open Management Consortium. Click on the map to check out there site and membership.


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Sun Microsystems
Software
Systems Management
Sun Connection

Ok. Now that I’ve started a blog everyone keeps telling me the 2nd entry is the hardest. I’m going to take the cheap way out by blogging as a proud father. A few days ago my 8 week old boy discovered his thumb. Thought I’d share the magical experience with the community. I tried to think of all kinds of analogies to somehow relate this to the world of systems management, but failed, Enjoy!

Taro Finds His Thumb

Tags:
Sun Microsystems
Software
Systems Management
Sun Connection

This is my first official blog entry of what I hope to be many.
For those that don’t know me, I’m a software marketing wonk working in Sun’s Connected Systems Network team. CSN (which always makes me think of Crosby, Stills & Nash) is a newly formed group that consists of Sun’s systems management software including Sun Connection, N1 System Manager, N1 Service Provisioning System and Sun Management Center. I’ve been working on this portfolio of products since September and as I learn more and more I become increasingly excited about the opportunity to do something innovative and industry changing for our customers.
An area that I am particularly interested is the concept of Systems Management 2.0. Michael Coté from Red Monk has an interesting blog entry and draft presentation that he posted back in Septemeber that compares Systems Management 2.0 companies to “The Big 4.” I love the focus on collaborative systems management. I’ve been spending a lot fo time thinking about how to blend the systems management 2.0 focus of collaboration and accessibility with the enterprise focus of scale and breadth. To do this, I’ve been trying to think less like a traditional systems management vendor and more like a consumer-oriented web 2.0 company such as Flickr Maps. Jonathan discussed in his blog our first experiment to adopt some web 2.0 concepts to the systems management space with our geotagged world map of registered Solaris deployments. Imagine if customers had access to this to navigate to a deeper level of detail regarding their datacenters or if they could use this for reporting to their internal management?
What other great services are out there that you think should be adapted to the systems management space?
Look forward to the responses!

Tags:
Sun Microsystems
Software
Systems Management
Sun Connection