SUN Working with Linden Lab to Port Second Life to Solaris?
by Pixeleen Mistral on 21/05/07 at 10:36 pm
Interview with a Sun storage engineer who wants voice and no morning downtimes
by JayR Cela
After reading a recent business magazine article about Second Life and “Value Added Integrators of Information Technology Solutions”, I decided to take a tour of several of the major players with established an SL presence. While most of the tour was a parade of corporate sims with no employees in sight, Sun Microsystems not only had a live person – he also hinted at possible collaborations between Linden Lab and SUN – and also told me that there will soon be a private compound for internal SUN use only – this may be one of our last chances to talk to a real Sun engineer before they all retreat behind the firewall ban lines private island.
A Guy from SUN
ON arrival at SUN Microsystems at Sun Pavilion (167,157,91), I was surprised to be greeted by an actual company employee – Guy Trenchard – who graciously offered me a tour of the virtual corporate campus and some insight into where SUN may be headed with their foray into Second Life. During our talk, Guy mentioned something that may be a surprise for some readers – apparently SUN is working with Linden Lab to move at least some of the Second Life software to SUN’s platform – Solaris.
Greeter whispers: Welcome to Sun Services and Solutions Center. Contact Orion Ogee in-world for questions about Sun Services and Solutions
Guy Trenchard: is there anything i can help you with?
JayR Cela: oh I am just exploring various IT corp. campus’s
JayR Cela: care to show me around?
Guy Trenchard: sure i have a bit of time
Guy Trenchard: follow me
JayR Cela: great
Guy Trenchard: this is the general swag area.. please help yourself
JayR Cela: You: what is the black box Guy?
Guy Trenchard: ah project black box
JayR Cela: You: correct
Guy Trenchard: if I can move
Guy Trenchard: this is our conference and training center
Guy Trenchard: this is project black box
Guy Trenchard: a complete data center in a shipping container ready for fly out
JayR Cela: wow
JayR Cela: you should sell 1 to LL for SL / they can barley keep things together
Guy Trenchard: we are working closely with LL I know that
Guy Trenchard: porting SL over to Solaris
JayR Cela: good idea
Guy Trenchard: this building is dedicated for hardware
Guy Trenchard: server on this floor
Guy Trenchard: work station and storage on this level
Guy Trenchard: ok next to the java dome
Guy Trenchard: are you familiar with java?
JayR Cela: yes I am familiar with JAVA Guy
Guy Trenchard: i am not Java coder
JayR Cela: well I must say although the Sun Micro campus is compact it is very well layed out
Guy Trenchard: sorry i am giving you the fast tour..
JayR Cela: you have been very kind
Guy Trenchard: i am a storage engineer in RL
JayR Cela: was I just lucky to find a Sun Micro employee or is the Sun Microsystems SL campus usually staffed ?
Guy Trenchard: we have a hand full of volunteers..
Guy Trenchard: still grass roots…
JayR Cela: that is wonderful / the IBM & Cisco campus’s were larger but empty of employees
Guy Trenchard: we have another island we are building as well
Guy Trenchard: after that is built I will be on that one
Guy Trenchard: internal Sun only though
JayR Cela: ah
Guy Trenchard: this is where i spend most of my time
Guy Trenchard: so how is your day going?
JayR Cela: do you enjoy spending time here and feel their may be potential benefits to having a presence in Second Life
Guy Trenchard: my team is usually here with me
Guy Trenchard: but we are fighting huge RL issue now
Guy Trenchard: we all work remote from each other..
Guy Trenchard: this makes more like a team 
JayR Cela: I agree there is enormous potential to get people from different parts of the world together to share ideas
Guy Trenchard: I thing the training aspect is huge as well…
Guy Trenchard: you can do 3d white board
JayR Cela: it is fascinating
Guy Trenchard: what do you do in RL?
JayR Cela: I am a SL content creator
JayR Cela: I treat SL just like a regular 6 day a week job
Guy Trenchard: ah
Guy Trenchard: i think being in SL now is like being on the web in 1994
Greeter whispers: Welcome to Sun Services and Solutions Center. Contact Orion Ogee in-world for questions about Sun Services and Solutions
JayR Cela: I agree with you
Guy Trenchard: it may get to that point..
Guy Trenchard: but working in SL is like working in RL it takes effort and time
Guy Trenchard: too many do not realize that
JayR Cela: well Unfortunately & fortunately I am pretty much homebound so I have lots of time
Guy Trenchard: i work from home as well
JayR Cela: I guess you just have to find the right niche before someone else does, and jump on the opportunity :_)
Guy Trenchard: well for a long time SL has been dominated by the creative types
Guy Trenchard: left us engineer’s behind
Guy Trenchard: but i am starting to see limitations that really need to be worked on.
JayR Cela: such as?
Guy Trenchard: you go to the Charles Schwab building…
Guy Trenchard: and there is a screen that has real time ticker just like on Blomberg
Guy Trenchard: or CNBC
Guy Trenchard: that requires API’s to get LSL to interface with oracle and SAP.. and the like
JayR Cela: well Linden Script is very limited in its scope beyond creativity
Guy Trenchard: right.. but it will get there
Guy Trenchard: once the demand is there
Guy Trenchard: very few screaming for it now
JayR Cela: I see you have been in SL aprx. 7 months with your Avatar
Guy Trenchard: yes
JayR Cela: are you have much difficulty learning the ropes so to speak ? :_)
Guy Trenchard: scripting is coming along…
Guy Trenchard: simply a matter of not enough time to devote to it
Guy Trenchard: but other than that, it is a huge issue for my extended team in SL
Guy Trenchard: Sun.
Guy Trenchard: the learning curve is steep
Greeter whispers: Welcome to Sun Services and Solutions Center. Contact Orion Ogee in-world for questions about Sun Services and Solutions
JayR Cela: since JAVA & SL are both open source formats can you see a possibility of the LSL scripting language blending with JAVA ?
Guy Trenchard: oh yes…
Guy Trenchard: I am a KSH, Perl person though
Guy Trenchard: our Java gaming devision built a lot of this island
JayR Cela: oh the same people from Sun Micro that developed the Game CHROME ?
Guy Trenchard: yep
JayR Cela: what are your feelings about the future implementation of live voice chat coming to SL ?
Guy Trenchard: it cannot come sooner
Guy Trenchard: then this goes from being an also ran to IM to primer method of communication
JayR Cela: I have been to the BETA Voice grid & LL seems to be having a great deal of hurdles to overcome at this point, what are your feelings on that?
Guy Trenchard: it is new.. it will be good..
Guy Trenchard: if it was easy it would have already been done
JayR Cela: good point :_)
JayR Cela: Guy ? i do not want to pry , but your position in SUN MICRO as an employee is what, if I may ask ?
Guy Trenchard: I design and manage storage networks, Disaster recovery, and backup solutions
JayR Cela: ho ho / that is almost to funny / disaster recovery is one of LL biggest problems as well as storage networks
Guy Trenchard: for the Record LL is not one of my clients
JayR Cela: perhaps they should be they are in desperate need of some actual help with IT solutions as opposed to trying to constantly fix what seems to be breaking on an ever increasing basis
Guy Trenchard: do you have relationship with them them?
JayR Cela: no I am a SL content creator / architecture / design and SL journalism
Guy Trenchard: you have some real talent
JayR Cela: ty. I would not want to endanger your job with SUN MICRO but I am doing research currently for an article
Guy Trenchard: ok
JayR Cela: so far I have been to the IBM, CISCO now SUN MICRO next stop is AMD then perhaps several other major players in IT infrastructure
Guy Trenchard: yes
Guy Trenchard: how would that impact me?
Guy Trenchard: i forgive all typos as others forgive mine
JayR Cela: I guess, I am politely asking if I may quote you?
Guy Trenchard: on what?
JayR Cela: some of your insights as far as SUN MICRO and how they may be able to help LL in the future
Guy Trenchard: gimme a sec RL issue
JayR Cela: ok sure
Guy Trenchard: if LL is going to go prime time the schedule downtime at Start of business east coast has got to stop
Guy Trenchard: we cant do work here if we don’t have a system
Guy Trenchard: other than that i think the relationship is a good one..
Guy Trenchard: sorry but I have a customer on fire
JayR Cela: Thank you so very much for your time Guy :_)
Guy Trenchard: tc
JayR Cela: see you somewhere in the future ha ha :_)
JayR Cela: bye-byee
Greeter whispers: Welcome to Sun Services and Solutions Center. Contact Orion Ogee in-world for questions about Sun Services and Solutions
Rebel Television
May 21st, 2007
I always thought it would be cool to teleport to a corporate sim and meet some employees of the parent corporation. Too bad they’re always ghost towns or full of newbies who barely speak English. I’m glad you had a different experience.
Eddy Stryker
May 22nd, 2007
It’s actually not all happening behind closed doors. On the sldev (Second Life Developers) mailing list a couple people have been talking about their progress and problems they’ve encountered getting Second Life to run on the Solaris platform.
TECH: Some of the original problems were endian issues, and those seem to be cropping up again to a small degree, but most of the problem is that OpenSL is hardcoded to target three specific platforms. There’s ongoing work to make that more generic so platforms like Solaris and OpenBSD are better supported, and the bits are all flipped the correct direction on each platform.
I don’t think there are many major hurdles left, you’ll probably see the fruits of this very soon, if they bother to make a big announcement of “Second Life now on Solaris!”. I would make a jab at the popularity of Solaris but I learned early on not to attract the ire of those guys
.
Prokofy Neva
May 22nd, 2007
This is a great piece of reporting, we so often don’t hear what the hell is going on out on these corporate silos where there are no people.
Re: Eddy’s claim. Of course it’s happening behind closed doors, because open source=closed society. I get the mailing list and read it assiduously but I can’t read 2 issues a day, and it lags for me and I miss a few, and whoops I miss an important thing like this: that a separate company is getting the SL software to work on their own platform? So doesn’t that still mean “it’s not hidden”? No, because it *is* hidden, burried in an obscure newsletter of a group you have to know exists and have to get into and follow assiduously — it’s not stated as a goal anywhere or explained, you have to “just know”.
That’s been one of my beefs with the “open source movement” is that while it sounds, well, “open,” in fact it’s a closed group of cadres who can follow its intricacies and therefore make decisions all alone, with no oversight or public knowledge. Oh, the public is supposed to go and learn Java and C+++ and whatever or they can’t play along? Well, the public doesn’t learn genetics and biochemistry but they can weigh issues like stem cells. In the same way, these issues can and should be explained, too. Oh, the public shouldn’t get to participate in decisions of a private, propreitary company that has to be competitive? Well, of course not except…didn’t we hear that this was an *open source* project and…isn’t this a world? And the ground work for the Metaverse?
I have been saying for a long time that I suspected what the Lindens would have to do is open up a parallel grid to put SL 2.0 on it for corporations that couldn’t bear the lag, the Wednesdays, the bling, the extreme sex. And that they’d simply corner LL on this because their purchases would be so huge and their reputations would be so huge, and the temptation would be so great. I had always envisioned the Lindens as themselvse putting out this grid and still somehow controlling the situation while licensing their software.
What I see this story is indicating (if I understood it) is that the software could be given to the other companies to work on their own servers, leaving SL without any server headaches.
My question is whether that’s what’s going on here. Sun has SL software it plays on its own platform? It’s own servers? Away from the grid? Or? Not sure if “platform” and “own servers” are the same thing. But even if they aren’t in this case, I can see this is a bridging step to that separate grid.
otakup0pe Neumann
May 22nd, 2007
Prokofy the door is only closed if you forget to open it. Sun has the SL viewer running on their operating system, nothing more. To the best of my knowledge OpenSim has not been seriously investigated by any of the large corporations in Second Life, only academic institutions.
https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2007-April/001664.html
Inigo Chamerberlin
May 22nd, 2007
Did I notice a very different attitude there between Guy Trenchard and ‘x’ Linden?
‘sorry but I have a customer on fire’
‘a customer’…
Not to mention the comment about start of business Eastern time shutdown.
LL’s problem there will be that it’s always start of business somewhere in the world.
That can only be solved by a completely different approach to updates – or possibly, when users can run their own servers, allowing them to make the timing decision they are most comfortable with.
Which means that mandatory client updates would have to go and, gasp, backward compatibility at least from update to update will have to be introduced.
Food for thought.
Prokofy Neva
May 22nd, 2007
>Prokofy the door is only closed if you forget to open it. Sun has the SL viewer running on their operating system, nothing more. To the best of my knowledge OpenSim has not been seriously investigated by any of the large corporations in Second Life, only academic institutions.
Sun has the SL viewer running on their operating system, nothing more.
If the Sun servers instead of whatever brand of Servers the Lindens have in their colo are being used, perhaps they might find out stuff (and are you sure they *aren’t* Sun servers in their colo? I mean, aren’t all servers Sun servers lol?). They might make it run better. And that’s a bridge to making it run on a separate server farm away from the laggy and blingy and updating-on-Wednesdays grid.
In other words, what’s keeping the formation of separate (and not equal) grid farms with SL 2.0 on it, is only ideology, and possibly a kind of “business model”.If those were dispensed with, then there wouldn’t be aversion to it.
Curious Rousselot
May 22nd, 2007
Pictures?
Baba
May 22nd, 2007
Why would anyone want a sun server?!
I’m pretty sure LL runs nothing but off the shelf AMD Opteron boxes and a few new Intel servers with Debian Linux at the moment.
otakup0pe Neumann
May 22nd, 2007
> In other words, what’s keeping the formation of separate (and not equal) grid farms with SL 2.0 on it, is only ideology, and possibly a kind of “business model”.
Simple, the technology isn’t there yet. Let’s wait till we can teleport or cross sims without things ending up in an “uncomfortable place”. And I don’t mean the back seat of a Volkswagen. In all seriousness, there are other platforms that support running in such a way – SL is not (yet) one of them. OpenSim is getting very close however. I wonder if OpenSim runs on Solaris.
otakup0pe Neumann
May 22nd, 2007
> In other words, what’s keeping the formation of separate (and not equal) grid farms with SL 2.0 on it, is only ideology, and possibly a kind of “business model”.
Simple, the technology isn’t there yet. Let’s wait till we can teleport or cross sims without things ending up in an “uncomfortable place”. And I don’t mean the back seat of a Volkswagen. In all seriousness, there are other platforms that support running in such a way – SL is not (yet) one of them. OpenSim is getting very close however. I wonder if OpenSim runs on Solaris.
Panda
May 22nd, 2007
“I get the mailing list and read it assiduously but I can’t read 2 issues a day, and it lags for me and I miss a few, and whoops I miss an important thing”
Wow. Prok complaining that someone ELSE writes too much? *BOGGLE*
Second Arts
May 22nd, 2007
I hope a chapter is notending
I read with more than a little interest the Second Life Herald article about Sun Microsystems efforts in Second Life. Going deeper into the interview with avi Guy Trenchard, however, I saw this:
Guy Trenchard: well for a long time SL has been …
shockwave yareach
May 22nd, 2007
Baba:
Friends of mine ran a website and several active forums on an old Sparcstation 20 for 3 continuous years without a reboot, crash, or fault. Reliable hardware and a solid OS were Sun hallmarks at one time — you can still repair old Sun gear and run it without a problem for ages. Can’t say firsthand if the new crop is as good as the old, but I’d trust a Sun and Solaris a thousand times before I’d trust Microsoft Server. The fact that few people write viruses targeting Solaris is an added plus.
Nacon
May 23rd, 2007
Hey Prok…. this report is another example of idiots at Herald posting chatlog that you were blabbing about before.
Good luck with that statement, cause you’re still an idiot.
Khamon
May 23rd, 2007
Sun has already built one virtual world using open source engines:
http://research.sun.com/projects/mc/mpk20.html
TrannyPet Barmy
May 23rd, 2007
Oh boy, same old people, still trying to pretend they’re in the know.
How amusing, at the mention of Sun, to see every one instantly ranting over Solaris and Sun Hardware, argueing over what operating system the viewer will run on, which hardware the servers will run on, which operating system and hardware is best, and all the while, failing to see what the true LindenLabSun interest is ! How typical, to see this place degenerate into tangents of “i know more than you”, all the while totally avoiding the topic of interest !
*** PROJECT DARKSTAR *** is what i think you are all failing to grasp or show having any knowledge of here, http://research.sun.com/spotlight/2006/2006-03-20_Darkstar.html
This is what LindenLab are interested in, and what Sun are interested in touting to LindenLab, the whole Sun interest is nothing what so ever to do with weather the SL Viewer will run on a Solaris box or not, or weather LindenLab will use Sun server appliances !
It’s Sun’s gaming framework targeted at MMORPGs, a decent version of what LindenLab have been trying to do for the last how ever many years. Designed and written by decent developers who have a clue, rather than 1/2 ass 2 bit amateurs like LindenLab.
TrannyPet Barmy
ps. not sure who was going on about using Opteron based machines instead of a Sun systems, but, what exactly do you think Sun are putting in their machines now ???
Bluey
Jun 4th, 2007
great read… well written… but i don’t see the guy giving permission for this to be quoted…
did he? or … mmmm just assumed?