Monthly Report: 06/15/2001 - 07/15/2001

Name: Honglin Su, Technology Account Specialist, Central Region

1. SUMMARY

It was still a busy month, though slowed down a little bit.

The thing to highlight is that we are making progress at Spectrum Investments (division of Sun Life), after we (with Dave Mason) have been following up the account on the E5000 upgrade project (4 x 250MHz CPU à 8 x 400MHz CPUs, etc.) for more than half a year, thanks to the support from the management and the enterprise service, the customer bought 2 x E3500 from our loaner pool, and upgraded E5000 with the parts from E3500s.

2. Accounts Activities

• AT&T Canada and AT&T Global Network Service
1. Based on the customer feedback, I organized another Lunch and Learn session on Sun Fire Midframe Servers and Sun Cluster 3.0. I introduced Sun Fire servers, while Ken Kembry spoke Sun Cluster 3.0. It was well received and more than 15 people attended the meeting. After that, I also spent time with the operation planning staff, followed up with any outstanding questions during the meeting.
2. Prompt response to the customer’s needs or questions, e.g. Solstice OSI 8.1.1.
3. There are more activities at another division (IES, Internet and E-Business Service) in this month. Had frequent communication with the server operation manager regarding our product (environmental features of Netra, E420R, etc., as the division has more than 60 Netra t1 /E420R), also worked with Ron Marshall to help the customer identify the concerns while they are deploying HP OpenView on Sun Solaris (HP is trying to move them to HP-UX).

• Rogers

1. As a continuing effort, I have been working with ACE performance and engineering group to help Rogers Cable evaluate whether they have sufficient hardware platform to support their growing business with the new service broker application. The current dilemma for the application server sizing is that the new release (service broker version 5) is not done completely yet by Sigma Systems (software vendor for Rogers), but we need some measurements of version 5 to be able to credibly predict if the upgrade required to support 600,000 customers (up from 325,000) is within the expandability of their current machine or not. From the measurement we have done on the current environment (CABAPP2, E420R, which has 2CPU/2GB memory and still have room to go to 4CPU/4GB memory; and CABDB1, E4500, 3CPU/8GB memory). When under moderate load, neither of these machines shows signs of performance problems. We'll need more loads to show up the problems if there is any. Thanks to Russell Crook and David Collier-Brown, we also helped the Sigma Systems solve a technical problem (library panic) they came across.

2. Rogers iMedia: a new area for Sun at Rogers. 17 radio stations sites by year-end, sharing a common host/server and common applications. At this point should have 6 or 7, but have 1 site (Kiss 92) which resides outside of a CMS (Content Management System) on an independent server. Issue has been around CMS usability. Eprise selected as CMS. Continue to work with customer and different partners to deliver a good solution to Rogers, e.g. BlueSpark for the whole project management, Eprise for the CMS vendor, iPlanet suggested as the application and web server, InfoStream is the responsible for Sun equipment fulfillment. Oversaw the project, and did sanitary check for the configuration, which has been changed from 5 x Netra t1 AC200 to 4 x Netra t1 AC200 and one E220R with A1000. John was pleased that it would be the first order for FY02 (some other order might come first).

• Sun Life Financial and Spectrum Investments

1. Dave Mason leads the role for account management, we are moving forward at Sun Life. Maintained good customer relation from technical site, I worked closely with Dave for the project like server and storage consolidation (preliminary stage), we hope that we could have breakthrough sometimes at Sun Life.

2. Sun Life (Spectrum Investments): the hardware upgrade (E5000: from 4 x 250MHz CPUs to 8 x 400MHz) has been discussed for a while. The customer wants the benchmark number of their own in-house application, which would show significant performance improvement if they proceed with the upgrade. Dave worked out a solution with 2 x E3500 (one with 6 x 400MHz CPUs and one with 3 x 400MHz CPUs) for try and buy, the customer can utilized the parts of the E3500s, and to build the new production E5000. It’s a success for us, the customer has bought the 2xE3500 plus some parts upgrade.

3. TRAINING SUMMARY

4. MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

• Assisted Vic for loaner pool on a needed basis;
• Attended Comdex Canada’2001, help Heather by bringing over Sun banner to the exhibition, also accompanied the customer from AT&T to walk through the show.

5. PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING MONTH

• Continuous support for AT&T, Rogers and Sun Life.
• Create more chances to present at the customer’s site.

6. Others

• Plan to take some training on Serengeti in the next months (in September), due to the increase requests from the customers;