Sun Microsystems announced today that David Yen, former executive
vice president of the company's storage group, has been named
executive vice president of the microelectronics group within Sun.
"We want to emphasise that this will not affect our product
roadmap in storage," stressed Nigel Dessau, senior vice president
of storage marketing and business operations at Sun. "Sun has
decided to refocus some higher level executive resources around
microelectronics."
Jon Benson, former vice president of tape engineering, will take
over for Yen as executive vice president of storage, Dessau said.
The company also plans to move engineering resources related to its
server-based network attached storage (NAS) product lines, which
include the Thumper X4500 direct attached storage (DAS) product and
the Honeycomb content-addressed storage (CAS) archive product,
under John Fowler in the systems business. Engineering resources
for tape and all other disk storage, including the 9000 series,
will remain under the storage group, Dessau said.
"We're preparing a new NAS campaign," Dessau said, which the
company is calling NAS 2.0. The new products will include a new
2000 series of NAS products to go with the 3000 and 5000 series
products to be announced at Storage Networking World in San Diego
on April 16.
Dessau also said the company has plans to further develop
products, like Thumper and Honeycomb, under Fowler, using an "open
source NAS stack based on general-purpose hardware," namely Sun
SPARC servers running Solaris.
This is the second such reorganisation of storage executives and
development resources in a matter of month. Sun's goal is to bring
them under the control of systems departments instead of separate
groups for disk, tape and software that had existed within Sun's
Data Management Group.
Last August saw all storage software, including QFS, SAM-FS and
Honeycomb, all of which run on Solaris, moved under the Solaris
group headed up by Rich Green, executive vice president of
software. A major salesforce reorganisation also took place last
year, which has left
some Sun users cold. More recently, Sun
offloaded support engineers for the now
defunct 6920 product to OEM partner Hitachi Data Systems
(HDS).
While the shifts may suggest that Sun is steadily eroding its
storage business in favour of its more lucrative server and
operating systems businesses, Dessau insisted this is not the case.
"[Yen] brought clarity and direction to the roadmap in the storage
group," Dessau said. "He leaves us with that in place, and we are
intending to execute on that roadmap in the next couple of
weeks."
According to Tony Prigmore, senior analyst at the Enterprise
Strategy Group, this kind of move isn't necessarily unusual for
vendors with both server systems and storage in-house. "If we look
back across all the large systems and storage players over the last
15 years, they have played the 'where should storage reside' game
back and forth," he said. The engineering moves might be of some
concern, Prigmore said, "since any time a company consolidates
engineering resources, the amount of organic innovation coming out
of the group might be compromised."
However, both Prigmore and Illuminata principal IT advisor John
Webster concurred that the moves are in line with current CEO
Jonathan Schwartz's public statements about the focus for the
StorageTek acquisition under his watch.
"Sun has been saying we bought StorageTek for two things -- tape
and field service, and support," Webster said. "If those are the
two things they're focused on with StorageTek, they have to decide
where to put the rest of their storage products."
At an analyst event in January, Webster said Schwartz told
attendees, "If you want to see where we're going in storage, look
at Thumper," which Webster pointed out doesn't involve StorageTek
IP. "It sounds a little weird, but it's actually refreshing that
they've realised there's IP on the systems side they can drive into
storage products."