Taylor's Take on Sun Storage
My storage team and I focus on three of the most important aspects in any industry: customers, competitors and market trends. There is insight to gain and share in this role, so here is our take on Sun and Storage - Taylor Allis
Sun's Latest Web 2.0 Investment - MySQL
For the record, I am not completely attached to the term "Web 2.0" - it has quickly become another buzzword, making its meaning even more ambiguous. But it does give a general idea of a certain data center application that has vendors investing more and more in it these days. (Sun's own term for these types of apps is Redshift).
But I do love that my last blog analyzing the IBM XIV buy touched on the two primary IT markets Sun is investing in - our traditional market (where most of our revenue comes from today - let's not forget) and our Web 2.0/Redshift markets (our emerging customer base). What has also been nice here at Sun (I came through the StorageTek acquisition - has it really been 2.5 years already???), is that Sun is focused on the entire IT infrastructure - from storage to the server to software to services.
With that said, Sun has made big news today with its announcement to acquire MySQL (pronounced My S-Q-L by the MySQL folks, but they also don't mind if they are called My "sequel" either). Links:
So, I stated previously that Web 2.0 apps require massive scalability, high performance, open/flexible platforms, efficiency and lower costs. Some facts on MySQL:
It's the world's second largest independent open source company believe it or not (Red Hat is the largest)- It's the leading database for online applications and services, and the world's most popular open source RDBMS (the “M” in LAMP)
- They have over 400 employees in over 25 countries
- They get more than 50,000 product downloads daily(!)
- MySQL reduces database licensing costs by up to 90%
- MySQL runs on 20+ platforms
- See some select "Web 2.0" customers at right -->
So, Sun made a big bet in the "Web 2.0" space today - in the software stack, at the database level. We also continue to invest in the entire IT infrastructure. In storage, we have one of the most complete portfolios for traditional storage applications, and are making heavy investments on the Web 2.0 side.
Sun's most recent and significant storage investments in the Web 2.0 market are "Thumper" (Open server, software and 48TB of storage in a 4U rack for only $1/GB!) and Lustre (one of the world's most scalable, high-performance storage cluster file systems).
One innovation built and the other bought - a healthy mix I'd say....
Posted at 12:00PM Jan 16, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
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