Solaris 10 Launch

So it’s been an exciting week for Solaris: at long last, we officially launched Solaris 10 on Monday. Unlike most product launches, the Solaris 10 launch was heavy on both technical details and customer testimonials: it was very important to us that those covering the event understand that this isn’t ballyhooed nothingness – this is real technology that is having a tangible impact on those using it. To that end, Mike, Andy and I described the Solaris 10 technology areas in some depth to a group of fifty journalists in a Solaris “boot camp” on the morning of the launch. I was pleased by how many journalists were there to begin with, and impressed that none left over the two hours or so of informal presentations: this showed a real willingness on the part of the press to understand what we had done. (Impressively, they even stayed after I suggested to one journalist that he and I strip to the waist and wrestle to settle a difference of opinion. Fortunately, we were able to settle the difference without resorting to fisticuffs.)

But my favorite part of the launch – hands down – was when Don Fike from FedEx stood on the stage and described the application performance problems that FedEx has found using DTrace. It’s always gratifying to see a customer achieve a win with DTrace (which of course is what motivated us to write DTrace in the first place), but it’s something else entirely to have a customer be willing to stand on a stage with you and put their reputation on the line by vouching for your technology. And on top of it all, to have that customer be FedEx – a company that I (and most, I suspect) hold in very high regard – well, it nearly brought a tear to my eye; moments like that just don’t come often in one’s career…

Overall, the launch was a great success. Driving back up to the City with Mike, we wondered aloud: how would the competition respond? As it turns out, we didn’t have to wait long: Martin Fink, HP’s VP of Linux, dashed off a hasty diatribe against Solaris 10. As others have pointed out, this is pure HP FUD: it doesn’t attack our technology in any concrete fashion, but rather attempts to put baseless fear in the minds of those who might be considering it. In particular, Fink returns to a classic FUD attack from the early 1990s: fear of a mixed-endianness planet. This was certainly a surprising angle of attack: given that this issue has been technically solved for nearly a decade, I naturally assumed that this was a dead issue for any technologist. But then, his attack reveals what is confirmed by Fink’s bio (and photo?): Fink isn’t a technologist. But most amusing was Ben Rockwood’s hilarious response Thank you, Ben, for responding with the pluck and thoroughness that I believe characterize the Solaris community…