Sun Hits Storage Crossroads

It's all change over at Sun, which overhauled its server and storage business and finally gave users a peek into its long-term virtualization plans this week.

Although there are no job losses directly tied to the reorganization, there are some Sun execs on the move, one of whom is Nigel Dessau. The vendor's vice president of storage marketing is taking over a new role as head of Sun's Strategic Alliances and Licensing team. He will be replaced by former StorageTek exec David Kenyon.

In his final blog as a storage wonk, Dessau described the rationale behind Sun's decision to merge its server and storage teams into a single unit: "If you look around at all the major 'systems' companies you find that the server team and the storage team are always under the same umbrella organization," he wrote, adding that this will create synergies.

Sure, there are real synergies between servers and storage, and Dessau is right to highlight the success of the x4500 ("Thumper") device as an example of this. But the server/storage hybrid is just one product in a vast portfolio of tape libraries, NAS boxes, and SAN devices.

The challenge for Sun over the coming months and years is ensuring that its other storage products do not slowly disappear within this Systems group as other, "sexier" technologies such as blade servers and the much-hyped "Magnum" InfiniBand switch come to the fore.As Pund-IT analyst Charles King told me earlier this week, Sun, even after stumping up $4.1 billion for StorageTek, has not exactly been synonymous with storage.

"It has always been one of those parts of the company that has been more of a question mark than an exclamation point," he said.

With Thumper, Sun has proved that it can develop state-of-the-art products that tap into users' twin demands for compute power and storage, but the big question now is how will the vendor's Systems group handle all the StorageTek legacy systems.

Will they breathe new life into an ailing part of the vendor's business, or does reorganization mean the kiss of death?

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