I’ve been visiting TheSunOperationFormerlyKnownAsStorageTek in Louisville, CO this week, for a series of meetings. For the most part these have revolved around the alignment of technology roadmaps and how best to use ex-STK technology in Sun products and vice versa. As with all such projects, the purpose of the meeting is not to make the final decisions, but to agree on goals and processes and establish working relationships between engineers. The hard work is still to come, but you have to start with the face-to-face connections.
As part of these meetings, John Fowler (EVP of Network Systems) and Glenn Weinberg (VP of Solaris) flew in. Two VPs sounds like a bit of a misfit for a technical meeting, but these guys are engineers: we were soon discussing the finer points of HyperTransport bandwidth with different HBAs on PCI-X and PCI-Express, as well as the build procedures for OpenSolaris code drops.
This evening I was invited to a Christmas party hosted by Barbara Bauer, VP of software in Sun’s Data Management Group. It was great to hang out with the people I’ve been working with over the last six months and not talk about work!!! Many thanks, Barbara – and David for giving me a ride into Denver.