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Friday Jan 19, 2007

Storage: The 'Wild West' of the IT Industry

It struck me yesterday that last week was the start of my 19th month at Sun. So far, one month longer than a friend bet me I would last. Seems like the perfect time to start a blog. I have naturally resisted blogging based on the fact that I was not (and am still not) sure anyone will be that interested in reading my random thoughts! However, natural shyness (and sarcasm) aside – welcome to my blog:

I just got around to reading "The New New Thing" by Michael Lewis. I am sure most of the Valley people read it 5 plus years ago, but I just got it for the holiday.

It's as good of a read as Lewis' previous book, “Liar's Poker,” which was about Wall Street in the 80s. If you haven't read "The New New Thing" then a quick synopsis: Jim Clark starts SGI, Netscape and Healtheon, while rewriting the rules for Venture Capitalism and how high-tech start ups think. All this to the back drop of trying to build a boat that can sail around the world – using only a computer (or computers) to steer it. Whether he succeeds with the boating I can leave to you to read the book...but the start-ups are the really interesting part for me.

Working in the storage industry, and specifically storage at Sun – I feel some of the excitement of the boom era starting to come back. If you think about it, in storage we are still working on the 'new new thing.'

Compare storage to the rest of the industry:

  • In the processor war there really are one, two or maybe three players left – Sun, Intel and maybe IBM with Power/Cell.
  • In the operating system space it's also probably down to three: Linux, Solaris and Windows (the world will always have a place for z/OS but its not really the same type of general purpose operating system – it's a data and transaction engine).
  • In networking – its really IP and IB.

And so it goes. Now consider storage: Storage is like the 'Wild West.' New technologies at every corner and each new start-up has a different answer. Disk and tape are the easy part- and those industries have already begun the consolidation referenced above. But, how about optical, holographic, solid-state, etc? And then there are the techniques and interfaces – SATA, SAS, MAID, De-duping, Single Instance , etc. Some hotter and more proven than the others. And this doesn't even start to reflect what will happen when the general purpose hardware and software that are appearing in every data center, start to appear in storage appliances. More on this another day.

So working for Sun and working in the Storage industry is a really exciting place to be. I came to Sun through the StorageTek acquisition, and am planning to stay. It's been a good 19 months and I think the next 19 might be more exciting.

And so the blogging begins...to share the excitement, as well as my random thoughts!

Posted at 12:09PM Jan 19, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage  |  Comments[1]

Comments:

Nigel Agree 100%. Not coincidentally, storage is "merely" the physical incarnation of the business' information assets, and so any innovation focused on improving the care and feeding of the information assets must impact storage. The volume of information grows faster than the business grows, because the business needs more information to gain competitive advantage, and because the information itself is evolving into more complex structures. I suspect that server costs are actually declining because of the sheer amount of consolidation going on on the back of innovations in multi-core, multi-threading. Information, on the other hand just keeps growing, and, because most storage infrastructure has been the result of tactical acquisitions outside of the structure of a formalized storage strategy, there is an enormous opportunity for delivering improved value for the storage dollar to customers. The next 19 months should be very interesting!

Posted by Rob Nieboer on January 20, 2007 at 09:31 PM MST #

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