Does Sun protest too much?
EMC may have a point when it says Sun Microsystems has a bit of acredibility problem with regard to its storage strategy. Sun has jumpedaround quite a bit in that area, and, reading between the lines, its latestannouncement suggests that Sun might change its strategy yet again.
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That begs the question of whether Sun is really committed to the HDS storageproduct, the HDS 9900, which is now being sold by Sun as the StorEdge 9900.Buyers of the product may well ask, "What's the real strategy here? Does Sunhave a commitment to HDS over the long run, or is it planning to get rid ofthe product as soon as it can fix up its own product?"
The T3 is a very good midrangestorage product, but it isn't enterprise class. Still, Sun keeps trying topush it in that direction. And in the end, an in-house product will usuallyencroach on an OEM product. That means buyers of the StorEdge 9900, the Sunversion of the HDS 9900, should be wary.
Sun has been through several unsuccessful attempts to crack the storagemarket for its own Solaris products: first, the OEM relationship with LSILogic; second, the failed A7000, purchased from Encore; and then the firstiterations of the T3. The OEM arrangement with HDS followed in late2000--but only after Sun CEO Scott McNealy, who doesn't want Sun to be areseller of products from other companies, was persuaded by his executive teamthat Sun could not gain a leadership position in the market with Sun Solaris externalRAID controller-based storage without a true enterprise-class storagesolution.
Moreover, it's important to keep in mind that HDS sold some 350 of itshigh-end storage systems, the HDS 9900, in the Solaris market in 2000,before the relationship with Sun existed. Therefore, when Sun says itwill sell upward of 500 StorEdge 9900 systems by June, that figure must benetted out from the 300 or 350 that HDS would have sold anyway, meaning thatin reality more like 200 will be sold.
Tightly joined storage systems, servers and software may be a betterstrategy for Sun--and companies in general--but it doesn't necessarily servecustomers' interests better. There aren't many customers that dedicate awhole IT infrastructures to one company--most have heterogeneousinstallations.
All that said, much of what Sun has done in the storage area representsprogress. Sun needs to recapture leadership for external storage in theSolaris market, in which it now trails EMC. But Gartner believes that isunlikely to happen for a year or two at least.
(For a related commentary, on Hitachi Data Systems' midrange storage offerings, see gartner.com.)
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