I just completed my talk at the 2007 Connectathon, the yearly NFS gathering for interop testing. I’m thankful to Tom Haynes for having me. It was a nerve racking exercise to prepare for it… what do I have to share with the guys that wrote NFS? I described it to my wife this way: “You use Post-It Notes right? – Yeah. -What if 3M asked you to give a presentation on them? – Your screwed.” Jason Hoffman came to the rescue and helped me brainstorm a presentation where I focused not on NFS itself, but the ecosystem in which NFS exists… because thats something I know much better. All in all things went well. It was definitely a learning experience and I’ve always dreamed of attending a Connectathon… I never imagined I’d be speaking at one.

Here are the slides if anyone is interested: Connectathon2007.pdf

The Connectathon floor isn’t what I expected. I imagined racks of screaming systems in a booth arrangement with engineers frantically darting back and forth across the room with laptops… sorta like the NYSE floor for storage interop. The reality is quite different. A gigantic room (conferences are commonly held in the same room) with 3 long rows of tables with chairs. Laptops and workstations are sitting at almost every other chair and engineers plugging away largely silently. There were storage setups, often 1 or 2U systems and an array scattered around under the tables that you won’t even notice just walking around. Only two full server racks of (can’t say). I was surprised by how much of the testing is done on laptops and workstations. This is largely because performance isn’t what they are testing, its interop.

One other thing I learned that was interesting is that all talks at the Connectathon are open to the public! No registration needed. So if you too geek out at the idea of being at a Connectathon, you need only to show up. There is still a day left of talks, so if your in the Silicon Valley and want to listen to NFS goodness check out the talks list: Connectathon Talks Schedule.

Sun’s Enterprise Class Replication solution for open storage systems is now part of OpenSolaris! OpenSolaris Project: Sun StorageTek Availability Suite is now OPEN!

This brings into the open source realm a component we’ve been missing, a real serious replication solution for point-in-time image replication and continuous site-to-site replication. Pair this with OpenSolaris, Thumper, ZFS and…… can you see where we’re headed here!?!

I’ve already pulled Availability Suite (AVS) and I’m doing test deployments today. This is an exciting day in the ongoing progression of Sun storage toward a brighter and open future. Joyent’s on board!

Here are the slides from my Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group talk. Thanks to everyone who attended, listened in, or played along via Glynn Foster’s excellent IRC log of the event. I’m sorry I didn’t upload the slides prior or during the talk (like I said I would) but I couldn’t access the net from my MacBook in the room.

Questions or comments on the presentation are welcome. Because the crowd was so technical I chopped all marketing stuff out of the presentation, which I felt a little bad about because I would have liked to get people more interested in buying and using our containers than just with the technology and issues behind them. Future presentations, such as if I presented at BayLISA, will focus more on what you can do with the containers and less on the backend, but with Jeff Bonwick and the ZFS team on hand you tend to get technical. In addition to the ZFS guys, I’m thankful to Josh Berkus of Sun/PostgreSQL, Brendan Gregg and his lovely wife, Stephen Lau, Mike Kupfer, the fabulous Michelle Olson, and everyone else who attended.

The part I won’t forget was when I talked about my plans for Zones and iSCSI and the room was silent and everyone had this blank look of either A) disbelief, or B) shock. I took it as a sign that we’re really ahead of the cutting edge in our own rite. It was classic.

Visit the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group (SVOSUG) web page for information about past and future speakers. SVOSUG is, of course, the best and oldest OpenSolaris Users Group in the world. No bias.