For Inquiring Minds...
Last week was Sun's annual Analyst Summit. We spent 3 days with industry and financial analysts. Overall, the event's energy was great! All the presentations are available here, for those interested in what we had to say.
Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the rumor mill continues to work. I think Chris Mellor of Techworld captured both the rumors and the content presented nicely in this article.
For those inquiring minds, I thought I would take some time to answer the more frequently asked questions...
Q: How have customers responded to the integration?
A: In general, we are hearing very positive feedback from both Sun and StorageTek customers. In fact, our recommend Sun Index (RSI) for the storage business has exceeded our goal with a current score of 94.8%.
One thing I attribute this positive response to, is the integration of STK best practices into Sun Services.
Q: What happened to VSM Open?
A: As STK we were heading in a direction to build a VSM platform for open systems using the same architecture as our VSM mainframe product. This past summer we did a reassessment of our customer requirements and determined that we could better leverage a partner for a standard application front end, and leverage our experience with VSM on the high availability, disaster recovery, and tape integration aspects of the product.
We spent some time assessing 25 VTL vendors before making our decision on how to proceed. Now we are testing our VTL solution in enterprise environments with the same rigor that we test our mainframe VSM product. In the next couple weeks you will see the first shipments of this product.
Q: How is encryption adoption going?
A: So, as many have heard me talk about, there are three ways to do encryption: in the system, in the fabric and in the device. Clearly we have chosen to do encryption at the device level...so our customer don't have to change the things that they don't want to change.
We have architected our encryption solution to provide customers with a single solution across their entire infrastructure. We are looking to provide customers with a single solution for ALL their applications, not just one.
The solution is selling and working, most interesting is installation: this is going FAR better than we even thought. In some cases taking just a couple days versus the couple weeks we planned on.
Q: Is Thumper a storage product?
A: So, what I find most interesting about Thumper is that Sun is integrating storage into its other product lines. Thumper is a product that demonstrates Sun's systems approach.
One of the things we are doing in the storage business with this product is looking at adding storage “personalities” to it, such as VTL.
That's it for now, but I will try to answer some of the other top asked questions, and expand on these topics, as the week(s) go on.
Posted at 05:19PM Feb 12, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[0]