Dynamic Reconfiguration
The founder was a
contributor to the hardware domains and dynamic
reconfiguration features of the Sun Microsystems high end
server line. The idea was that through a combination of
hardware and software, multiple coherence domains could be
run in a single machine, completely isolating multiple
instances of the operating system. SImilar to a virtual
machine, this capability helped with the reliability and
serviceability of the machines. In particular dynamic
reconfiguration allowed customers to add or remove memory,
processors and IO devices without rebooting. This
capability enabled Sun to take away literally billions of
dollars of revenue from IBM in the late 90s.
Automatic Diagnosis and Recovery
The founder was a
contributor to efforts at Sun Microsystems to automatically
detect failures, isolate them, and enter data about the
failure into a flash memory on the part itself. This
enabled Sun to reduce its cost of service and improve
quality at the same time because returned parts did not
need to be tested to determine where the failure was, and
this prevented bad parts from re-entering customer
machines.
