Adventures in systems land

Thanks to James Governor at Redmonk or @monkchips on twitter, for the pointer. In this pretty direct interview, Linus Torvalds says something I got into trouble for about 7-years ago. Linus says “An OS should never have been something that people really care about… it should be completely invisible”.

I gave the keynote presentation at the OS/390 Expo and Performance Conference, I think in either 2000 or 2001, during the presentation I made exactly the same point, only about Linux. Yes, Linux was great, yes, we were going to do some pretty innovative things with it, but if in 5-years time we are still wrrying about scalability, driver compatibility etc. then we’d missed the point, we shouldn’t really have to care about the OS.

Unfortunately in the audience was the IBM Account Executive for a large multi-national company, and the CEO from that company. Rather than come and ask questions afterwards, they took one point from a 75-minute presentation and complained about me to my then VP, Carol Stafford. Carol “invited” me into her office, I had to explain the remark, and context, Carol understood and took care of things.

So it’s with a wry smile I read the Torvalds article, and then sat up and wondered, do we still care about the OS, or has the stack become more important?

via James Governors del.ico.us feed, I read a pretty disappointing blog post on Don MacAskill CEO and Chief Geek of SmugMugs, SmugBlog.

Reading some of his past posts it’s easy to accuse Don of being a bit of a Sun fanboy. He recently ran a server bake-off to get some new servers for SmugMug, and decided to go with Sun, fair enough. I can’t dispute that Sun have a good offering in the web space, and being based out on the West Coast, get a lot of face time and word of mouth endorsements with many of the startups, especially in the web 2.0 space.

I know how important this can be. Back in 2000, I hung out a lot at the Silicon Valley World Internet Center and then, late in 2005, early 2006 worked out of the IBM office in Palo Alto with a number of key virtualization partners to get some direction and development work started.

What troubled me was not the Don had chosen Sun for his servers, but his comment “One of the attendees, who spends obscene, ungodly amounts of money with IBM, can’t even get engineering staff on the phone. Apparently, IBM has a big sales force who’s trained to buffer customers away from the engineers.”

“shurley shome mishtake”? My whole career before I joined IBM, was littered with experiences with sage and helpful IBM engineers. Either through the numerous user groups, or best of all, when the products broke, and after talking to level-1 and level-2, you’d get through to the level-3 folks. I remember to this day having a discussion with someone called, I think, Linda Iannella, who worked up in Kingston in the mid-1980’s. She knew code like no one I’d ever spoken to, when I asked how she was so sage, she replied, “I work on this code 10-hours a day, every day”. Adrian Walmsley, a former IBM UK employee was probably the most influential, and I’m delighted to have worked with him later on.

Have things changed so much that you can’t get in touch with the technical team at IBM anymore, or was Don’s experience atypical? Is it a west coast versus east coast thing, or just becuase IBM is so big these days?

I have to admit, getting things actually done these days can be difficult at times if you approach a novice IBMer, but we have an excellent kStart team out in the valley working with some startups, and most of the blue coud work is being done in Almaden and SVL.

Let me know what your experience has been. Can I help ??

One of my first posts in this blog, was on the subject of complexity. James Governor of Redmonk weighed in today on complexity with a trackback post called “What SOA needs to learn from Ruby On Rails“.

I noted, that while our software, and often our systems were complex, that was because our customers are, not because we design them to be complex. Our customers run a vast array of machines, in widely different environments, supporting a broad range of applications. Of course, this is chicken and egg, and is a difficult tightrope for established solutions to walk. We could just remove most of the configuration options and in a generation or two the complexity would have gone, but what about the customers?

Forced into a straightjacket of “our way or the highway”, would you take the later?

It’s easy for the new kid, in this case Ruby on Rails to come out and offer little or no configuration options, side files etc. It doesn’t have to, it has never made a significant change it what or how it does things. The same isn’t true for the old-timers. Comparing SOA to Ruby, is like comparing a transport system to a footpath.

It is a subject important to me though. At the moment I’m carefully trying to marshal the merger of the function in the System p Hardware Management Console with that of IBM Systems Director and Director console. My desire is to make one simple management platform that acts both as the local platform director, managing configuration, hardware and service management etc. and at the same time providing a set of programmable, function services based interfaces to provide both remote access, and remote management.

So, I’m all for simplicity but it has to be thought through. We are doing this with the System p Configurations for SOA Entry Points. The original SOA Entry points were pure software plays divided into five categories, People, Process, Information, Connectivity, and Reuse. We are taking the entry points one step further and mapping the software onto System p removing another layer of complexity by showing how they work, how you can configure them and testing them as a total solution.

You can read the System p Configurations for SOA Entry Points overview here, via FTP

John Lennon once sang “It’s been too long since we took the time, No-one’s to blame, I know time flies so quickly” … “It’ll be just like starting over, starting over”.

I was asked again this morning about complexity, in relation to my view on both hardware and software. It would all be so simple if we were a start-up provided we gave you the “Power to leave” you could have it our way, or no way.

When I got back to my desk I went looking for a blog comment I wrote on complexity. For completeness and because it came up this morning, here is my response.

“The real challenge though that IBM faces, is not the complexity of our products, but the complexity of our customers.

If we were &Ampersand. small software company period, or an organisation we could do just a single product and say “there, thats SOA/ESB” its great like it or lump it.

However, that wouldn’t be much use for the millions of customers over dozens of OS’s, and four hardware platforms, built up over 30-years, who want to embrace SOA. Sure, many of them can and will do it without our help. Heck, some of them even do it without our products ;-( but generally while we have often intimate knowledge and understanding of their systems, they still want a shopping list of options rather than just do what we say.

So, that leads not to complexity, but rather to completeness. Many products with interfaces to, and programability for services based applications and infrastructure.

As always, people would like a single message, a single voice, but mostly customers don’t want a single product unless it’s the one they currently heavily exploiting. Even then they want something else to integrate to it, with it, or from it.

This is why open is key. Embracing web services, getting involved and implementing WSRF, WSDM et al. will pay off in the mid-term for both the customers and for IBM. The ability to implement applications around a services base, with a strong mediation engine, that participates in and can support a robust set of open industry standards is key.”