Nigel Dessau

The Sun Raises on Storage

In my haste to post the news earlier this week, I accidently deleted an earlier post. Due to its overall relevance, I am just reposting...

Over the last couple of weeks I have been visiting customers ... first in New York as part of an event we held for the financial sector and then in New Zealand at our Executive Advisory Committee. On both trips I also got to spend time with other folks from around Sun including our East Coast sales team, executives from services, software and our server group. All the conversations, both internal and external really signaled a shift in the perception (and understanding) of storage at Sun.

The most apparent way to illustrate this is our sales folks that recently went to the American Top Gun Sales Academy enthusiasm about Jonathan Schwartz' presentation on Sun's strategy and where storage plays. Now I don't say that because he's the boss – but because the single biggest challenge for most the team has been working out what the Solaris and Storage Strategy is and how it benefits them...and most importantly their customers. For many, the speech represented a light bulb moment of realization: Solaris is THE long term differentiator for Sun (and Sun Storage).

So, I have been accused of being dense (no voting required), and believe from personal experience that it is a three inoculation process to understand the strategy. On first blush, Solaris seems to be a distraction from the storage business...opening questions such as: is it all about Solaris attach? What about the STK business on mainframes and other platforms? Is it just Solaris inside?

What was made clear to the team at Top Gun, and will be made clearer to all in the next few months is four key points:

1) Sun will leverage the power of Solaris in all our solutions.

Millions of dollars and R&D hours have been spent to make Solaris the best OS, and the investment continues at full speed, making it our competitive weapon (and our customer's too)!

Take for instance our VTL solution. A VTL solution is a system (probably x86), running an OS and an application. All VTL vendors – even those who sell appliances – need those three things. For us at Sun, working with application partners like FalconStor, we use our own systems and our own OS. In our case Solaris...getting the benefit of all that R&D (and rich functionality) for free.

A stand alone storage player (as StorageTek once was) or even some of the other systems companies out there, has to license an OS from someone or use a free Linux distribution. Both are costly and both distract from the main purpose­ producing the best solution for our customers. Today we are working on adding differentiated function to VTL in the shape of VTL-Enterprise. How can we do that? Well we have the storage skills and we don't have to pretend that we are a systems company...we are one! With the emergence of general purpose computing solutions that advantage gets even bigger.

2) Solaris is rapidly becoming the most rich storage OS out there.

Currently we can run all of our storage applications on Solaris...but some things can be done better as an integrated function of the OS. As an example let's think about file systems.

Many of the functions and applications we add to our storage systems are to compensate for what the file system can't do. Typical file systems don't provide RAID, don't provide de-duplication, can't do continuous data protection (CDP) etc. So we've decided to do that with ZFS. While some of this is futures, with ZFS today we offer:

• Enhanced data protection by allowing a ZFS pool to survive the failures of two disks
  
• More reliability and the ability to identify disks that could be used to replace a failed or faulted device in one or more storage pools
  
• More flexible administration and enable the replacement of an existing ZFS file system with a clone of that file system
  
• More data integrity by ensuring that Snapshot data is always from one consistent point in time and enabling users to recursively create snapshots for all descendant file systems

You see the point...the closer proximity to the OS enables the file system and the data protection solution to become faster and more reliable. Less pieces to integrate is better for everyone (especially the customer!). And file systems are just the beginning...

3) We must grow the Storage community using Solaris – and it's free!

Next problem is how we get our customers and partners to use (and improve) all the new integrated functions. Clearly the historical model is to sell you an appliance or solution using Solaris. But what happens if you are not a Sun customer or partner today? How do you get access to it? How do you join the dialog? Until recently – you couldn't.

Now you can go to a website and download all that code and knowledge and use it FREE! What's more, you can participate in Open Solaris and the growing Storage community – again for free.

The other great thing for customers is that they get to choose who's general purpose components, for example x86 server, they want to run that code on. Clearly we would like them to run it on Sun but if you want to try Solaris – run it on your Dell! Run it on your HP! Even run it on your IBM!

But what about running it on your NetApps box? Opps, sorry can't do that one – they don't sell systems they sell appliances only (and at a 70% plus margin).

Clearly this choice is good for the customer – the increased competition means a new economic reality! And we hope it's good for Sun as we expand Solaris users to potential Sun Solaris Storage customers.

4) We make money from serviceability, integration and selling the whole Sun solution

So you download free OpenSolaris and at some point our free NAS stack – do you need to pay Sun any money?

No you don't have to pay Sun any money...it's really free. But (there had to be a but) I have never met a customer who would run anything in their data center without service... Today, 70% of those who have downloaded Solaris have done so on non-Sun platforms. We were getting no revenue from them before so nothing lost if they don't take maintenance.

So why buy an appliance? Well we think we have the expertise to integrate the parts and tune the solution faster than most customers can do it for them selves. We think we can support it better as an appliance – because less options and configurations make easier support. Finally, customers may not want to become storage device specialists – they may want to leave it to us. But some customers might be happy to do all this themselves – in which case we are happy to support them.

Think about it this way – you can consult Emeril's cookbook Emeril's cookbook and buy the ingredients but can you cook like him? Some can – some can't. Many ways to solve the same problem.

So, what will be available from Sun and by when? More news soon (very soon!).

Posted at 02:25PM Mar 20, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage  |  Comments[1]