Monthly Report: 09/01/2003 ~ 09/30/2003

Name: Honglin Su, Technology Account Specialist, Toronto

I. SUMMARY/HIGHLIGHTS

Completed tasks with quality, though they came in a very short notice. By prioritizing the tasks, I had to work late or even spent the weekend quite often in order to beat the deadline or give others more flexibility. e.g.  prepared customized presentation materials on the labor day for Allstream Sales Conference held in early September; analyzed the customer SAP environment and provided upgrade options for Siemens Business Services (for SBS's client AMI Doduco) in the middle of September;  identified a viable way to increase network bandwidth by enabling gigabit ethernet Jumbo Frame feature at Rogers Shared Services at the end of September. I'd like to take the opportunity to extend my gratitude to Rajiv Thomas, Michael Dvinyaninov and Sun Engineering team (NSPG), their dedication and responsiveness make this company great!

Managed the customer expectation in a difficult situation to drive customer sales and achieve high levels of customer satisfaction. e.g.

1) Received the L25 Tape library (OEM from Quantum) for Allstream's evaluation on September 4th, but it was already a month late, while the competitor (Qualstar) finished their respective evaluation in early July. In the course of the waiting for the arrival of the L25, I had regular communication on a weekly basis with Allstream, Quantum (Sun OEM product manager) and the storage partner, thus mitigated any negative impact to our customer. Upon receiving the L25,  leveraged the Sun storage partner (Open Storage Solutions, OSS), thus kicked off the evaluation without any latency. Subsequently, I visited Allstream and guided the evaluation process, and everything went smoothly.

2) Rogers needs the gigabit ethernet Jumbo Frame feature to increase the network bandwidth. Due to our internal unresolved supportability concern, SunPS did not submit SOW on the expected date. However, I always find the positive spin out of the issue, so I took the responsibility to face the customer and updated the status cautiously to protect Sun's interest, and I asked the permission from the customer for more time.

I also initiated the talk between PS and Support Services, intended to make it possible. All the involved local Sun parties had a brief concall to exchange the positions. Thanks to Ron Rontzlaff, Keith Goobie, and Kristine De Muri of SunPS, at least, we had some deliverable PS document to the customer late Wednesday afternoon (10/1). As expected, questions on the supportability came up from Rogers, which John and I will address when we meet the customer on Oct. 8th.

3) Took the lead to follow up the outstanding questions on NIS and LDAP synchronization at Rogers Wireless. Thanks the help from Kabir Choudry and many other Sun engineering people, I responded the customer questions and seek further clarification responsively. Though we don't have a one-size-fit-all solution, more importantly, I always updated the customer regularly so that they know that Sun can be easily reached.

From August to middle September, I delivered the message of SunNetwork Conference to tens of customers of Allstream, MCI, Rogers and Siemens by email, over the phone, or through face to face meetings. Though they could not attend the conference physically, at least they can tune into the webcast and learn the message from Sun.

Had regular communication with MCI system staff, and thus identified a database upgrade opportunity. Using chalk talk, I delivered a Sun product line overview including server and storage. After collecting necessary sizing information, suggested a V440 with SE3310 or SE3510 be good for the project.

Kabir Choudry has done an outstanding job on SunONE Portal evaluation at Allstream given the circumstance of SunPS and Thor Technologies.

Presented Sun Competition Landscape at new hire training session with the following embedded messages: 
1) Sun has led the way on system scalability and performance, with a balanced design: fast computation, large memory, fast I/O, fast network, fast memory bandwidth, domains, etc. Thus, Sun is the king in the real-world benchmarks that matter.
2) Sun's consistent system architecture is a huge benefit to both Sun and the customers in this quickly changing world, which means quickly re-deployment of any system throughout the data center and significant lower management cost.
3) To de-myth any doubt about Sun's participation in TPC-C benchmark.

Assisted John and Kim Kuyten to build a matrix to show the cost saving scenarios if upgrading from old servers to newer ones.

II. ACCOUNT ACTIVITIES

1) Siemens Business Services (SBS) SAP Sizing

With a short notice, I worked with Rajiv Thomas to address an immediate requirement for re-sizing the AMI Doduco environment for SAP 4.7 and BW 3.1C. SBS's client AMI Doduco is currently running SAP and BW on Sun E3500s and E450s. In addition, there are actually two SAP landscapes; one here in Mississauga, and one in Forsheim Germany. AMI intends to run both SAP landscapes in parallel, here in Mississauga. With Dave Paish of SBS, we propose creating a new clustered environment which will contain both SAP production instances, with both QAS instances. Both DEV instances to be deployed onto one additional server.

Upgrading the E3500 and E450 would be costly even after considering the refurbished parts, and it costs more in the support side. It's no-brainer that new server configuration (V440) is a better choice in terms of cost, performance, and easy of migration.

Kanatek is the Sun partner in this project.

Meanwhile, John is working with Sun Siemens team (US) to propose a UC (Utility Computing) pricing model to SBS.

2) Jumbo Frame Supportability at Rogers

Together with SunPS, we met with the customer on Sep. 25 (Thursday),  identified it as a potential SunPS engagement, and SunPS was supposed to have the SOW ready by the following Tuesday (9/30). However, SunPS indicated that they could do it, but the work won't be supported by Sun in any form. It was Friday (9/26). To address this Sun supportability issue, I initiated and facilitated the Sun internal talk between PS and Support Services; meanwhile, I spoke to the manager of Sun Engineering (NSPG), and they agreed to support Rogers directly as the beta customer.

By Tuesday (9/30), we did not reach an agreement on the supportability of the work. I asked the customer for one day extension, and it was granted. After our internal concall the next morning (10/1), SunPS prepared a deliverable document. However, the supportability is still not resolved yet, John will continue the talk with PS and SS, so that we can well be equipped when we meet Rogers on Oct. 8th.

Concerns from PS and Support Services are all legitimate, but there are three factors to consider:
a. Competition landscape, HP-UX already has this feature in the same environment;
b. Sales opportunity: upon this success of this project, there would be another V880 to put into the environment; not to mention the long term Sun presence at Rogers;
c. Minimal risk: Sun Engineering can provide best effort support; besides, in about two months, we will release a fully supported patch.

Similar cases on the supportability would happen from time to time, every scenario is unique. I think it would be nice if we had a local steering committee which consists of GSO, PS, and Support Services so that we can follow the right process, assess the risk/opportunity, and address the challenge promptly. I can imagine when we start the managed services business, we will see more and more "not officially supported configuration", nevertheless, we have to find a better way to manage it.

3) Infinite Mailbox Opportunity

Rogers is using 3 x Sun E450 (full configured) as the mail gateways, and they also use MS Exchange internally. Rogers doesn't think it is necessary for the mail archive solution: each user's mailbox has max 35MB quota (manager has max 100MB), so they feel quite comfortable with the size of the disk arrays to support online access (e.g. 10,000 users only need about 350GB for the mail); however, they may consider the tape archive solution if the regulation mandates the store of historical emails.

Celestica might be a good candidate since they are using Lotus Notes right now. I'll work with Julie Byers for the latest status of Infinitive Mailbox for MS Exchange.

4) "Promise of Free SunPS" to Rogers

When I had a meeting with Cyril Mullins who is Rogers IT architect. He spoke (more like a joke) that John promised certain hours of free SunPS last year, and he'd like to take advantage of it if we are still willing to.  If we just ignore Cyril's "joke", that's fine. No immediate impact, and the project will continue to move forward. I discussed it with John, we can take it seriously, not necessarily to give away SunPS. John and I will schedule a meeting with Cyril Mullins: besides this specific project, how we can position SunPS more effectively and meaningfully for Rogers? Using it as a hook, we may be able to identify other projects: disaster recovery, server consolidation, and so on. Thus we are building a trusted relationship with Rogers, and I believe it is invaluable to Sun's long term presence at Rogers.

5) Sun solution to replace Stratus 1225 FTX

Bret Mondox from Allstream procurement department approached John for a Sun solution that could replicate the function of a Stratus 1225 FTX server.  The Stratus solution was a component of an AT&T Corp solution for an "easylink" solution. I suspect that Stratus 1225 is an old server with up to 2 x 96MHz PA-RISC (HP) CPUs, while new Stratus servers use Intel CPUs (Xeon) with  Windows (Advanced Server).

My guts feel that Netra 20 (2 x 1.2G Hz UltraSPARC-III Cu vs. 2 x 0.096G Hz PA-RISC) might be sufficient to replace those old Stratus servers. Cluster software may be necessary to achieve higher availability. But the more important factor is about what the architecture looks like and what the application and solution requirements are. e.g. application, network and I/O requirement.

6) Solaris license discussion on grey market servers at Allstream

Allstream acquired a few Sun Servers via unauthorized channel, and thus Solaris license became an issue. I clearly expressed Sun's position toward the grey market product: no Solaris license, no warranty, and re-certification to put into support contract. Moreover, I proposed a meeting to further explain our policy.

7) Java discussion at Allstream

I had a chalk talk to Steve Hotta and his team about Java architecture for a sales force automation application deployment at Allstream: difference between Sun version of Java vs. Microsoft version of Java, Java Applet vs. Servlet, J2EE, etc.

8) QFS/SAM-FS at Rogers

Had Rogers Wireless evaluate the QFS, and applied the demo licenses for them. The purpose was to enable storage sharing among multiple Sun Servers (SF6800, V1280, V880, V480, etc.). When Michael Selway (QFS/SAM-FS engineer) came to Toronto, I invited him to see my customer and wanted to explore further opportunity.

III. TRAINING SUMMARY/EVENTS

- 9/2-5, Volume Manager training;
- Congos Users Conference (9/16)
- Various online training on products and solutions.

IV. MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

V. ISSUES

VI. PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING MONTH

+ Sun ONE training (10/27-31), Facilitation Skills training (10/1-3) and Solutions online training (self-paced).

+ Rogers VOD RFP (due 10/10, have to prepare Sun configuration to Kasenna by 10/6)

+ Follow up various opportunities at Allstream, MCI, Rogers, and Siemens

+ Java Enterprise System Demo for Paul Neo of Rogers

+ Present NC03Q3 overview on 10/14