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

To: E_K_S who wrote (32826)	6/15/2000 1:31:00 PM
From: JDN	Respond to of 64865

Dear Eric and All: OK, I FINALLY found someone else who listened to the web cast on SUNW storage and took notes. I dont know Down South personally, but I have seen his posts before and he appears to know what he is talking about in other areas where I have known something. He addressed this post to another thread but its also appropriate here. The only thing I disagree with in his comments is that I believe the technology is farther along than he realizes. They had ACTUAL customers such as Corning Glass come forward and talk about their experiences using the SUNW storage system. These were multi terabyte situations. OK, here is his summary, comments welcome. JDN From the NTAP board info on Sun's Storage item: To: Miguel Octavio who started this subject From: DownSouth Wednesday, Jun 14, 2000 3:05 PM ET Respond to Post # 3481 of 3491 I just watched the SUNW Storage web cast. Here are my notes: Objectives of new storage family: Scalability (incremental) Safe (24x7) One stop service and support Easy to manage Rapid deployment Multivendor support Price/Performance Open Complete offering from one vendor Storage family supports: NAS; Direct Attached storage (DAS); SAN Built using a building block of a 9 drive RAID 5 array with FC connection to additional boxes. Two such arrays connected provide a "no single point of failure" configuration. May be rack mounted, 8 per rack up to 88TB using Sun Enterprise 10,000 Starfire server. A demo showing the removal of an active drive, power supply and FC connection demonstrated the "no single point of failure" features and a console controller showing the points of failure to the sys admin. (Nothing new here, whatsoever.) 1TB = $155K from Sun; (versus $700K from EMC) 10TB = $2M from Sun; (versus $4.6M from EMC) First and foremost is to provide DAS for Sun Solaris servers. Then NT; HP-UX; IBM AIX; LINUX, W2K. Second to provide NAS. StorEdge N8200 = 30% better price than NetApp. Third to provide SAN or "Managed Storage Network". Goal is to make the SAN open to any servers and storage devices. "StorEdge Network Foundation Software" using Jiro technology and the Veritas V3 SAN Access Layer APIs. Support Ancor FC switches today but putting together an interoperability testing program to certify all FC switches. Building SAN independent integrators partnerships. Will provide the ability to order a complete SAN with a single line item order. Providing "capacity on demand leasing program" at $.01/MB. Storage Management Software: -Console --Component Mgt --Capacity Mgt --Data Protection -Fabric Manager --Visual hyperbolic tree view -Data Protection Services --Point in time backup ---Called "Storage Instant Image" ---Runs at system level --Remote Copies ---Network Data Replicator ---IP Level copies Much discussion about services to be offered in connection with Sun Storage products, including dedicated engineers and a dedicated sales force. My impressions: Much of what we were seeing discussed were still in development. Only the DAS products for SUN servers is deliverable at this point, it seems. The target is EMC. They ran an ad which was based on a Tuperware (Storageware) party where the hostess presented a huge tupperware that had its own refrigeration and a special key that only certified people could use to open and put stuff in. To add more storage, you have to buy a whole new giant tupperware bowl at $10,000. Clearly a slam on EMC. Their "Storage Instant Image" capability is in answer to NTAP's SNAPSHOT. (Sun even called their product "snapshot".) I hope to learn the internals of this capability. It appears to be innovative, if it doesn't require "integration" with the app as they implied vaguely in their presentation. All in all, this appears to be repackaging of SUN servers with RAID 5 arrays and FC with the promise of "StorEdge Network Foundation Software", which is in development. A set of APIs will be provided so that other vendors can co-exist in the Foundation Software environment. Along with the packaged systems were simple configurations; specialized, dedicated services and sales; and aggressive pricing. In closing remarks it was said "This is not just about protecting our own base." hmmmmm

To: E_K_S who wrote (32826)	6/15/2000 1:52:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

JDN et al: I don't really know about this storage thing, but here's my two cents (I haven't watched Zander's announcement cause I don't much care for announcement shows, but I have read over the announcements on the Web site.) As you know, SUNW has been in storage for years already, and it has been known for years that the increase in bandwidth and the increase in the amount of digital data production (which are really two sides of the same cube) would mean the need for storage would explode. EMC has been making the claim that storage would commoditize servers for six months now. There are different architectures for storage that are popular these days, NAS and SAN, not all that different, both have their advantages and disadvantages in different application situations, both will make money for market leaders, both pose challenges for continued profitability because the barriers to entry aren't really that high (as one wag said, they're really just stacks of disks) until somebody actually invents something like massive and practical molecular or quantum storage devices. Sun has one big question: in order to REALLY capitalize on the storage demand explosion, their challenge is to move beyond their own installed base, and so the emphasis in these new storage products is that they'll work in whatever kind of homogenous networks you have. This is the real issue. They've tried this before, with other products both software and hardware, and have never succeeded. Have they gotten the cost down enough, gotten their service and sales guys trained and indoctrinated enough, gotten their heterogeneous management tools good enough so that this time's the charm? Nobody knows. The products look good but to me it's more how they're organized and incentivized internally than the details of their particular "stack of disks". I don't think there's anything technical about these products that will automatically give Sun some kind of critical mass. I haven't really looked at Jiro but everybody's got some management scheme or other. Can they sell peripherals into integrated environments even if it means the storage sales guys work with a customer to attach Sun storage to a network of W2K servers? So far the answer is no. For this to succeed it has to become yes. They've made "big bets" before. To me, it's more an internal politics question than anything else, and all previous internal politics questions at Sun have been resolved the same way: computer guys win, everything else takes a back seat. We shall see. I am reserving judgment. BWDIK --QS