We've discovered the same thing about storage systems. A few years ago you could get storage in just a couple flavors - the original block devices or file storage that came on the scene in the 1990s. Both had just a few data services floating around the bottom like olives for additional flavor. But now that the world is starting to build storage systems using standard server technology and general purpose operating systems, more and more flavors of storage are seeing the light of day. Flavors dictated by the problem facing the customer, not by the layout of data on some physical media. Flavors formed by the application dealing with the customer problem, not by speeds and feeds.

This week a team of specialists in the UK tackled a big problem faced by our European telco customers - the controversial EU Data Retention Directive with a new Secure Data Retrieval Server that leverages an X4500 server, Solaris 10 operating system, and some partner software build purposely to solve this type of problem. The UK team didn't have to spend years negotiating a product spec with large engineering teams - our engineering teams and our partner community had already empowered them with the ingredients to build a compliance solution specific to the needs of those European businesses dealing with the new EU legislation.

Someone asked me today if the announcement of the Secure Data Retrieval Server means we're no longer committed to Honeycomb. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fact is, our coffers are full of ingredients, and while our Honeycomb team is working hard with customers and ISVs in healthcare and digital libraries, our team closest to the problems facing European telcos found the combination of the X4500, Solaris, and CopperEye created a great solution.

Because when a vendor has the right ingredients, customers have choice.

I'm sure Riley was trying to achieve a state of Zen-ness with his hard work at this garden... look at the dinosaurs intertwined with the soldiers... the piles of rocks... even a pen cap thrown in for good measure... (is that uncapped pen lurking in the cushions of my chair?) And while the contemporary artists among us might relax with the results, the more conventional like me were just exhausted by the time Riley and dad left for the day.

And how is this related to storage you might ask? This is exactly what happens when you take special purpose storage technology from the 90s, running single threaded operating systems on specially built boards, and you put it into today's world. How can you run your Web 2.0 application on your storage system? Once you move aside the dinosaurs and pen caps, you're left with nothing but a mess of firmware trying to handle sectors, slices, and spindles.

That's why we're building our storage systems today with general purpose hardware and software. That's why we think Thumper matters. Because our world today is different. We've got to rake the dinosaurs, pen caps, and soldiers out of storage and give today's developers a better way to manage their data.

Check out the Big is Bad emblem on the tow-hitch - a perfect statement. But this big bad thumper isn't nearly as eco-responsible as our hybrid data storage server at Sun. Our x4500 data storage server holds 24 TB of data in a 4U of rack space, starting at $2/GB. A data storage server that can run any application - right on the storage system itself!

We're building new storage systems like this just because there's too much data in the world. Too much to just shove away on a block storage device and forget about. Too much to simply spool to a tape and ship offsite. Data today matters to more and more people over longer and longer periods of time. Data that has to be accessible when it's needed. You know what that means? It's not so much about how you store it - sure there are tons of options for disk and tape to meet your performance, reliability, scale, etc needs - its really about the applications you use to retrieve it for use again and again...

I did a double take. The guy driving did have a ponytail, but he definitely wasn't Jonathan...