LAS VEGAS -- Sun Microsystems Inc. will cut away some of the fat in
its midrange disk storage line going forward, according to
executives who addressed recent rumors in the marketplace that Sun
is looking to sell off at least part of its storage product line.
Nigel Dessau, vice president of storage marketing and business
operations at Sun, explained that within the 6000 line, the 6130 2
Gbps Fibre Channel (FC)/SATA array, which Sun OEMs from LSI Logic
Corp. subsidiary Engenio, will be phased out in favor of the 4 Gbps
FC/SATA 6140 array developed by Sun and announced Sept. 13. The
6140 has already been made the hardware basis for Sun's virtual
tape library (VTL) Plus product, which runs
FalconStor Software Corp. software. In addition, Dessau said,
the 6140's companion in the 6000 product line, the 6540, will
also continue to be developed in-house, despite recent
speculation to the contrary.
Sun officials repeatedly stated on Wednesday that Sun sees no
obligation to develop a "me-too" product when a better one can be
licensed elsewhere, pointing to its longstanding and successful OEM
deal of the Hitachi Data Systems Inc. (HDS) Tagmastore high-end
arrays, as an example.
However, Dessau said, midrange arrays "are the horse we've chosen."
He added that the 6140 and 6540 do have some Sun intellectual
property (IP) in them, including a specific modular upgrade path
between the two systems, and their ability to be managed by the
StorageTek Consolidated Array Manager (CAM) software.
On the
network attached storage (NAS) side, Dessau
and Victor Walker, vice president of Sun's Disk Products Group
said that the StorageTek QFS and storage archive management file
system (SAM-FS) would be blended with the Zettabyte FS (ZFS)
that's currently featured in Sun's Thumper product. ZFS is a
much faster 128-bit file system, but global namespace
capabilities, currently a feature of QFS and SAM-FS, are still
being developed. Walker said that ZFS could take over as the
main file system sometime next year.
One rumor that Sun executives did not dispel was talk that they
were shopping the 6920 midrange virtualization product.
"That's not a bad speculation," Dessau said, stopping just short
of confirming stories from inside sources first reported on
SearchStorage.com on
Aug. 24.
Dessau emphasized that if the 6920 was sold off, Sun would want
to retain joint custody and retain the product as part of its
portfolio, even if it was actually manufactured elsewhere,
according to Dessau. HDS has been named most frequently in industry
rumors about the sale of Sun storage assets, but Sun officials
would neither confirm or deny any specific partner as the most
likely candidate.
"We're always in conversations about how to bring solutions to
customers," Dessau said, "If we did [spin off the 6920], it would
be because it was the best way to spend our dollars."
But Dessau dismissed speculation about selling off disk
entirely, pointing out that Thumper and fixed-content archive
product Honeycomb, both systems Sun is currently marketing heavily,
are all Sun IP from software to hardware. Thumper's 24 terabyte
(TB) capacity in a 4U frame was Sun's doing, Dessau emphasized.
Ultimately, however, Sun officials said that the long-term
storage strategy for Sun would be more focused on object-based
storage, as exemplified by Honeycomb, NAS as spearheaded by Thumper
and tape-based storage, which is close to the hearts of its
StorageTek customer base.
Partnerships a theme at Forum
"We know that no customer is going to buy everything from Sun,"
said the company's new President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who
spoke at a keynote presentation Wednesday morning. "That's why we
want to be the best-partnered company in the world."
Aside from an announcement that Stanford University has signed
on as a customer of Honeycomb for a Google Library project, Sun's
only news announcements at the show were partner-based, including a
"preview" of a new VTL Enterprise system, which Sun said it will
codevelop with FalconStor.
VTL Enterprise, which Sun's storage executive vice president
(EVP), David Yen, claimed in a keynote presentation will scale up
to 1 petabyte (PB), will be positioned as a higher end VTL than
Sun's other FalconStor OEM, VTL Plus. VTL Plus, essentially
FalconStor's software ported to Solaris 10 and running on Sun
servers, will continue to be marketed and developed as well,
according to Jon Benson, Sun's vice president of tape storage.
Meanwhile, the VTL Enterprise will be a step forward in the
partnership between FalconStor and Sun, according to Benson, as the
two will be sharing and mixing source code for the product, slated
to ship in 2007.
Sun executives also promised that VTL Enterprise would have
deeper integration with tape archives. "No one in the marketplace
has done a very good job integrating with tape," Benson said,
adding that VTL Enterprise development would look to change that.
However, exactly how that feature will be accomplished, as well as
any other specific technical features of VTL Enterprise, are being
kept under tight wraps by Sun for now.
Finally, Sun also announced a new StorageTek Ready partner
platform in which 10 partners, BakBone Software Inc., Brocade
Communications Systems Inc., Dot Hill Systems Corp., EMC Corp.,
HDS, Hewlett-Packard Co (HP), LSI Logic Corp., McData Corp., Oracle
Corp. and Symantec Corp., will sit on an advisory and "provide
input on solutions the companies will bring to market, as well as
new ways to develop the StorageTek Ready brand," according to a Sun
press release. For the time being, the partner program will also
offer users support for products not currently on the Sun price
list, such as BakBone's NetVault software.