Simon’s Blog

If you read this blog regularly, you might know that we’re currently developing some new model-based computer vision technology that enables detailed information to be extracted automatically from large volumes of high-definition video. This is a computationally intensive activity - both on the storage and CPU fronts. We’re building a compute grid as part of making the computations manageable and scalable; and Sun was our provider of choice for the industry standard x86 compute hardware.

I first blogged about out experiences on 26 January (see High-Performance Grid Computing - Can Sun Deliver?). We were having problems getting Sun to take our money. It took interventions right from the top from at Sun, in particular from Dan Miller - SVP of Sun’s Global Systems Practice - to make things start to happen (see High-Performance Grid Computing - Did Sun Deliver?).

Well, the whole process certainly took a while, but we finally took delivery from Sun of the X2100 and X4100 boxes, and all the ancillary bits of kit, to make up our compute grid the day before yesterday, on April 17. If you’re reader of Solaris-related blogs, you’ll almost certainly read Ben Rockwood’s blog. His current blog entry details some of the issues that Joyent have had recently with getting hold of Sun hardware, and also his issues with the design choices on certain current boxes. As was the case with us, it seems that the Sun senior management have gone out of their way to be helpful in resolving Joyent’s issues.

So, all our Sun equipment arrived late on Tuesday afternoon - as you can see the boxes take up a fair amount of space…

We realised the Sun cabinet would be big, but we didn’t realize how tricky it would be to get up the stairs (it doesn’t fit easily on standard stair-walkers) - the delivery guys had a hell of a job, but made it in the end…

Then, yesterday morning, the engineers came to unpack the computers, and install them in the rack, while we disposed of the huge volumes of packaging.

They did a neat job. Incidentally, as an aside, the Sun hardware looks really great in the flesh - the picture above doesn’t do it justice. It’s almost (but not quite) Apple-like in terms of stylish finish: a massive improvement from the last time I bought from Sun. At that time, everything was covered in cheap-looking purple plastic. Anyway, now it’s over to us to get the grid up and running…

Dan Miller wants to schedule a call to discuss our experiences in ordering from Sun, which I will do. I have been holding back on this until we had everything in place, to be able to give the best possible feedback. I want to see Sun improve. Why? Because I believe the senior team at Sun, at least, wants to make the company’s products and service better; - see Jonathan Schwartz’s latest blog - What Brand Means. For me, the key quote is this - that good service is all about, “How to deal with the unexpected or the uncomfortable.” The point is, not everything goes right in business all the time. There will always be problems - and one of the things that differentiates companies is how they deal with things that go wrong.  The bottom line is: I prefer to buy from companies that make a serious effort to do a good job, because those kind of companies deliver the most value to their customers.

We will be ordering some more hardware from Sun in the near future. I’ll keep you informed of how that goes…