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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E_K_S who wrote (28032)	2/20/2000 12:27:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Eric - For systems vendors, storage will be an even more important market than servers going forward. Already, the storage revenue is equal to or greater than the server revenue for all of the big players, not just SUNW... and the margins in storage are better, so the effect on profits and margins is even greater. Although both IBM and CPQ have made claims to be the #1 storage vendor, careful examination of their data shows that almost all of those storage sales are to their own customers, for use on their own products. Only EMC has made a big play as a vendor of storage on other people's servers, and of course, ALL of EMCs sales are on other servers since they have no server products. I see two opportunities for SUNW in the storage space. First, they need to strengthen their own storage story with more device-independent storage products. This is a defensive requirement - they need to maintain and grow the storage business that is attached to SUNW systems. Second, they should expand that business to other people's systems. This will help them to demonstrate that SUNW storage solutions are competitive with systems from EMC, and eventually with CPQ and IBM as those vendors increasingly target SUNW storage sales. It will also give them the ability to expand the high margin storage business faster than they expand the server business. The need to control configuration is at least as important in the storage space as it is in the server space. The emphasis shifts to a lower level of the architecture - we become concerned with line-level protocols, where control is distributed, the tradeoff between improved performance (gained by moving more control closer to the actual storage devices) and improved flexibility (gained by making the components more generic). SANs attempt to resolve this tradeoff by creating a "storage area network" which has its own architecture and design paradigm. The thinking is that if this is accepted the way say LAN network architecture was accepted, then solutions optimized for this approach will be enabled, for example, virtualization of actual storage location, which can provide robust failover protection with little performance impact, and snapshot backup, which allows storage to be backed up without taking it offline, and without intervention by the host systems. But SANs also require changes in the way the systems look at and think about storage. When LANs were first introduced, storage and print resources were "aliased" - the local system thought it was looking at a local resource. While this was "transparent", it also meant that none of the LAN resources were optimized, and in fact sometimes big penalties were paid. For example, a backup of a remote disk to a remote tape required that all of the information be sent via the LAN to the client, processed on the client, then sent back over the LAN to the tape device, even if the disk and tape were on the same server. This was very inefficient... So until SAN architectures are comprehended and incorporated into the majority of systems architectures, only a few of the benefits will be realized by SAN users. SUNW could advance the state of the art on their own systems, but unless they are at the forefront of SAN technology, this would just open their business to EMC and the other SAN players. Getting a strong SAN play together for their own products, and then enabling highly integrated SAN solutions, would be a powerful move - much like what SUNW did for LANs in their early days.