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

To: DownSouth who wrote (32809)	6/14/2000 11:19:00 AM
From: Michael L. Voorhees	Respond to of 64865

Interesting Jiro Read at theregister.co.uk by Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco ........ So, cooking up an industry standard and letting it float towards some friendly disk vendors is a very Sun thing to do. And normally it would make a whole lot of sense. The wildcard - actually, there are two - boils down to this. If you stack a load of disks - and let's face it folks, that's all it is - that anyone on your network can talk to, then you're really talking about a cluster. A real old school, shared-everything cluster in the VAXish sense of the word. Where's the magic in that? Well, as our Sun friends are the first to admit, it's only in the software. Or rather, getting one software standard at the meta level, or at the file system level, that everyone else can get along with. And that's the inflexion point at which those hugely expensive EMC boxes suddenly become apparent for what they are - piles of hard disks you could get cheaper and quicker from the likes of Dell. And this tantalising prospect has been exercising both open source idealists and hard-boiled disk vendors ever since DEC clustered two disks together, and sent you the invoice. The open source folk are thinking cluster file systems, and the disk vendors are thinking smarter, object based devices. There's an obvious tie-up here, but they've never gone so far as to tie the knot. Maybe, until now that is. We'll report back later today on how extensive the support for a Jiro-centric SAN is with these folk, and how much traction Jiro - with its reviled community process license - appears to be getting. But the SAN war isn't over - it hasn't even begun. ......... Sounds to me like EMC could be in trouble, especially if SUNW sets the standard with Jiro, which we know they are very good at. Once the standard is set expensive EMC boxes could be morphed to commodisized "stack of hard disks". Has EMC floated a standard?