Re: The storage business
SUNW's foray into storage is for the same reason that HWP, DELL, CPQ, and IBM have been beefing up their offerings of late: it is all a reaction to EMC's emerging gorilladom.
It's all about margins and relative growth rates. Compute cycles continue to grow strongly, but online storage demand grows at the same explosive rate as does demand for bandwidth, which is to say many times the growth rate of compute cycles. It's a virtuous cycle: The more bandwidth you have, the more data you can collect, store, and analyze. The more data you have, the more bandwidth you need to access and transmit it.
EMC's vendor-neutrality is as important as its technology lead. Each of its competitors hopes to convince a portion of their box base to "stick with the home team" when it comes to buying storage, and some will indeed do so. However, their ability to sell outside of their own customer base is very limited and always tainted with the all-too-transparent agenda of selling processors to "complement" their storage offerings. Think SUNW will seriously propose an HWP processor solution to a customer as the best fit to a SUNW storage solution? Or perhaps HWP will help steer a customer to an IBM processor? Will that DELL storage array support support an AS/400 attached processor at the same level as they would one of their own boxes?
Given both the rapid growth in online storage demand as well as the logistical challenges of a constant stream of mergers and e-business alliances which require truly seamless interoperability across widely heterogeneous computing platforms, is it any wonder that EMC as the Switzerland of Storage enjoys a unique position that is unlikely to be soon undermined? |
