Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

Imation knows how to treat its customers

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to speak at Imation's 15th Annual End User Council (EUC) Symposium along with IBM, HP, some of Imation's larger customers and industry storage guru Fred Moore. 

Imation is the leading removable data storage developer and supplier - offering magnetic tape, optical, flash and removable hard disk storage to the consumer and enterprise markets.  Imation is a co-developer and supplier of Sun StorageTek 9840 and Sun StorageTek 9940 1/2 inch enterprise tape cartridges - and the product management and sales folks at Imation and Sun have done an excellent job growing this business over the past year.

Customers at the event include Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia.  The event is at the Hyatt Regency in Bonita Springs, Florida - a beautiful place (despite the multiple mosquito bites I left with).

What I said at the venue 

My topic was "IT Trends Impacting Sun Storage Investment" - download my presentation here.

There was one important question that I heard in several 1:1 customer conversations.  These customers were large tape users - which means their business is dependent on enterprise tape, fast-access tape drives and most (if not all) work in mainframe shops.  There were several customers that wanted to know about Sun's commitment to tape and Sun's commitment to the mainframe.  This is a fair question, as Sun's core operating system is an open platform - Solaris. 

But I was also saddened to hear that a Sun storage competitor had been telling some customers that "Sun is not committed to tape and does not have future tape roadmaps."  This is simply a falsehood.  Below is what I told these customers and what I said during my presentation about Sun's current commitment to tape and mainframe storage:

• Fact: Sun has Tape roadmaps for every tape product.  If a customer wants to see them, they can under NDA.   I make this offer to any customer with a concern. 
  
• Fact:  StorageTek was a mainframe tape company and Sun acquired StorageTek for ~$4B.   Why would Sun (or any company) spend that much on an acquisition to discontinue that company's products?
• Fact (and the most impressive fact to me):  Sun StorageTek has launched the following Open Systems and/or Mainframe products JUST THIS YEAR (1H CY08).  I'm from StorageTek - and can't remember this many tape announcements in the first half of a year: 
  
• Sun StorageTek SL3000:  Brand new Mainframe & Open Systems Library.  200-3000 slots, up to 50% the footprint and 1/3 power improvement over competitive products.  Supports LTO, T10000 and T9840 drives & media. 
  
• T9840D Tape Drive & Media: 4th generation drives that re-use the same media.  Backward compatible over 4 generations - now that's investment protection.  2x capacity increase with built-in data encryption.  <20 second access time to the 1st byte.
• Crypto KMS 2.0: Policy-based encryption key management station that now supports T10000A, T9840D and HP LTO4 drives.
• Sun StorageTek VTL Prime: Open systems VTL now with de-duplication!

Sun can be criticized for a lot of things - but Sun should be credited for its new investments in mainframe storage and tape systems.  Between the recent SL8500, SL3000, T10000 + Encryption and the new T9840D products, Sun StorageTek has the newest and most comprehensive line of enterprise tape systems in the industry - over IBM.  And most of the above items were announced AFTER the StorageTek acquisition. 

About the venue 

The event was well run - and there was a closeness and loyalty between Imation and its top customers that had to be admired.  People had fun, there was a stacked agenda and great networking opportunities.  Imation treated its customers (and speakers) right.  Kudos to Imation for thanking its customers in this way - especially at a time where everyone's budgets are tight.  The customers I spoke to were the people who did the real storage work as well - storage managers, administrators, etc.  There were no execs or VPs (that I saw) but Imation treated their core users like they were top-level execs.

My Nature Walk 

The hotel and grounds were amazing too - I didn't get to stay long, but I got to walk the grounds before I jumped on my flight.  I am a bit of a nature person, so here is what I saw:  The hotel is located in Southwest Florida - on the edge of a great Florida Mangrove Forrest. To get to the ocean you have to walk on a pathway that cuts through the Mangroves (picture at left).  On the path, I saw thousands of Fiddler Crabs scurry to their holes as I walked.  I saw the shell to a horseshoe crab - but not a live one unfortunately.  There were a ton of orb spider webs among the trees and I came upon a very large and beautiful "Crab-Like Spiny Orb Weaver" in the middle of its web.  Amazing if you like spiders - scary if you don't.

You are awarded at the end of your walk by a pier that jets out into the ocean (picture at right).  There was a beautiful White Egret standing at the edge of the pier.  But one of the coolest things I saw was when I looked into the water off the pier.  I saw several green reeds that looked like floating grass and Mangrove leaves - until I walked by and the "reeds" started to swim away.  Turns out I was standing over a school of Alligator Pipefish - pretty amazing...

 Thanks Imation!

Posted at 11:09AM Apr 15, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]