Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

Open Storage: Size & Growth

Both EMC and IBM have chimed in on what their thoughts are on Open Storage's future.  Tony's analogy made me think about a simple way to explain what I think Open Storage's future will be like: 

Open Storage & Builders Square: Let's rewind to the 1990's.  At that time I knew very little about home improvement.  In my mind, the only option was to save up to hire an expensive contractor to update my kitchen/bathroom/bedroom, etc.  But then a new store opened up close to my home - Builders Square.  That shop was subsequently replaced by a new store called Home Depot.  I was intimidated when I first walked in - there were only serious contractors around and I couldn't believe the amount of stuff they had.

Well the time came to update our bathroom - and as I was looking up contractors and plumbers in the phone book my wife said, "why don't you see how much it would cost to do it yourself by going to that new home store down the street?"  Fast forward to today and the people at our local Home Depot and Lowe's know me by name.  I have installed bathrooms, kitchens and built our basement.  I had help from store employees, instruction guides and affordable house "components" to do everything.  And when I walk into a store today; I see families make up the majority of customers - not contractors.   The simple fact is this - I could  not have done what I wanted to do with my house if it wasn't for the introduction of these new DIY home stores.   Open storage will help users do more with less - and reference architectures, solution blueprints, online communities and consultant services will help customers deploy open storage.

Open Storage & Stay-at-Home Moms:  Let's go back to the 90's.  I was also an early Web developer back then.  In fact, a quick Google search of my name will find a question I posted to a developer's help desk in 1996 where I ask, "Do you know when Netscape 2.0 for mac will be able to pick up Java applets?"  Pretty funny; and a testament to the longevity to open standards like HTML.  But my point is this - back then my wife was working in consumer PR and had absolutely no idea what I was doing for a living in high tech.  The Internet? The WWW? 

Today my wife has taken on the full-time job of raising our kids.  And I am happy to report that she is looking into starting her own blog - and she is looking at a blog from another stay-at-home mom as an example.  Now, if I told my wife she would be "developing" her own WWW journal back in the 90's she would have thought me crazy (which happens often) or the task impossible.   But Internet tools have evolved in away that let's anyone self-publish on the web for little to no cost.

I believe open storage will find its way in early markets; and the support resources and tools around it will evolve over time, bringing open storage to more traditional, mature markets.

Open Storage Size & Growth: (From the Open Storage Adoption White Paper)
How do we know this short of getting out our crystal ball?  Well, we don't - we need to estimate - and this is how we did it:  We took multiple IDC forecasts and rolled them into an internal Sun model - forecasts which included revenue from industry standard storage (JBOD, SSD, etc.) and open source software.  Then we made our own assumptions on how the market will behave - for example, we believe the fastest open storage adoption rates will appear in the entry and midrange NAS, unified storage (iSCSI, FC, etc.) and object-based storage markets.  We assume adoption will be slower in more traditional, higher-end markets.  So, this is NOT an IDC model - but an internal Sun model based on IDC and industry data (to be clear).  And this is an industry/market revenue estimate - it includes ALL vendor revenue from industry-standard hardware + open source software used in ANY storage system and does not give ANY info on Sun revenue or performance (to be clear again). 

So...we estimate open storage products and services will represent just under 12% percent of the total storage market in 2011. With IDC estimating the total storage market (hardware, software and services) generating approximately $90B in 2011, the open storage portion could be just over $10.6 billion.

We also predict that open storage will represent more than 20% of the external disk market by 2011.  At $5.2 billion, hardware represents the largest portion of the open storage market.  Tape storage and storage networking products are not included in the open storage forecast (although one could argue that LTO is industry standard hardware).

Next Blog: Sun Open Storage vs. Other Vendor Efforts

Posted at 05:00PM Jun 12, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]