The Next Step Towards New Economics for the Storage Industry
Sun made an announcement today around its Storage and Micro-electronic businesses. I really like the idea that we are taking Open Source economics to the last bastions of the closed worlds – storage and micros. Let me focus on what this means to our storage business.
First – we have a new leader. David Yen is head off to manage the micro business (and who better to do so!) and Jon Benson – who we all know well, is going to pick up the mantle for Storage at Sun.
David Yen did a great job focusing the team on the key thing we needed – getting our road-maps clear and viable. While we are sad to lose David, he has left us focused on our products and our value propositions – with road-maps that show us having a long and clear view of where we are going. Jon will be just the right guy to help us drive these through so we can deliver the products.
Second – we've shifted people to help accelerate the adoption of Solaris as the 'storage OS of choice.' See my last entry on the how's and why's.
Lisa Sieker, Aisling MacRunnels and my other peers around Sun are working closely to make sure we remain connected - but the truth is our teams talk daily anyway, so we are not sure we will see much difference. We all live in The Matrix!
But what does this mean to customers:
- Basically we are aligning the Sun organization with changes in the market to increase the speed of adoption of General Purpose Systems and their economics (for our storage portfolio)
- We can improve time to market by simplifying development processes through strong collaboration across all Sun development teams, and finally,
- We are maintaining a strong focus on Tape, Archive and long term data retention through a dedicated Business Unit run by one of the world's experts in the area.
So next for me – the press calls. Should be interesting to see what the feedback is!
Posted at 01:30PM Mar 27, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[2]
Posted by JC Crissey on March 30, 2007 at 10:17 AM MDT #
"adoption of Solaris as the 'storage OS of choice.' "
I have a major bone to pick with this statement. Given there are three available SUN files system types: UFS, ZFS, and NFS (granted NFS is a remote file system which leaves us with UFS and ZFS).ZFS is really cool BUT it is very new and "not quite" ready for "prime time" as it have some stability probelems and lack performance in some domins like RDBMS systems. This essential leaves UFS as the time tested "stable" file system. However when finding performance boundary conditions and/or simple bugs like an 8X performance slowdown for UFS with a RDBMS workload when logging is "turned on", option became the default in Solaris 10. Sun's Kernel Support Engineer (silver support case # 65406083) response was a shocking:
"I specifically spoke to one of our UFS Sustaining engineers about this case. Sustaining is the group of engineers responsible for bug fixes and RFEs in the current releases of Solaris. The engineer specifically told me that ufs is no longer an actively developed product. This means that new features will not be added to UFS at this point."
The above is a direct quote concernign an open case where there is a repeatable proven 8X write prerformance degragation.
Please expain how Sun can expect to somehow make the "adoption of Solaris as the 'storage OS of choice.' " if it doesn't even support the only viable file system it currently has ?
What are Jon Benson's comments on how Sun's product support fits in with this strategic statement ?
Posted by Jon A. Strabala on April 01, 2007 at 09:55 AM MDT #