Sun Shuffles Storage Again

Sun merged its Storage Division with its Systems Group today in an attempt to breathe new life into its storage business.

For some time now, storage has been a sore point for Sun, which struggled to swallow its $4.1 billion StorageTek acquisition and has since been hit by weaknesses in its OEM strategy and a slowdown in U.S. storage spending.

Sun's storage business will now be managed by John Fowler, executive vice president of the vendor's Systems Group. Jon Benson, who headed up the firm's storage operation, will report to Fowler, who in turn reports to CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

This is the third time in just over a year that Sun has made widespread changes to its storage operation. Last year it was even rumored that the vendor may sell off all or part of its storage business, possibly to Hitachi, although this was denied by Sun.

Speaking on a conference call today, Sun's Fowler promised that the merger would focus on technology, as opposed to job reductions. "There's a lot of technology developments going on in the areas of servers and storage," he said, explaining that the merger centers on the two groups' R&D, engineering, and marketing teams.The exec denied any suggestion that the storage reshuffle was tied to the recent spate of layoffs at the firm. "Specifically, as related to this announcement, there are no headcount reductions," he said.

In August, Sun revealed plans to cut an unspecified number of jobs around the world, as part of yet another major restructuring effort. Although the vendor has not yet broken out specific figures, some 129 of these layoffs are at former StorageTek sites in Colorado, according to news reports.

The exec clearly bristled when asked whether Sun's storage engineering "is just not up to snuff," during the conference call. "I think that's somewhat a pejorative way to ask the question, but boosting the engineering and R&D resources lets us get the best out of both," replied Fowler, frostily.

Despite the R&D and marketing merger, the two groups' sales operations will remain separate entities, according to Jon Benson, who was also on the conference call. "We're leaving the sales forces the same, so that the customer facing relationship will be intact," he said.

Pund-IT analyst Charles King thinks the reorganization could be a shrewd move by Sun. "It makes sense to have storage and servers in one division because they tend to be sold together," he says. "You're aiming at such similar clients that there's some economies of scale that you can manage by centralizing advertising and marketing."Sun has already made a song and dance about technologies that combine servers and storage, such as its X4500 'Thumper' device, which is aimed at customers looking to save on equipment costs for data warehousing or high-performance computing solutions.

Although Sun execs on today's call refused to provide any product roadmaps, they confirmed that future server/storage developments will focus heavily on interconnect technologies. "There are a number of technology interfaces, specifically 10-Gbit/s Ethernet, InfiniBand, and SAS, that offer different ways to interconnect computing and storage resources," said Fowler. "You can expect us to focus a lot of energy on that."

In this vein, the vendor recently unveiled its 3,456-port Magnum device, which it is touting as the world's largest InfiniBand switch. On his blog today, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote that the vendor is planning even larger versions of this technology, although he dispelled any suggestions that Sun would neglect its tape and disk offerings in the aftermath of today's merger.

"I'm expecting our Systems team to be just as focused on standalone storage and networking -- leveraging disk, tape (and all future removable media)," he wrote, highlighting the vendor's tape and archive offerings. "Tape, with effective indexing and retrieval, represents the most economically responsible (that is, eco-responsible) archive platform for long term storage."

Sun used this afternoon's conference call to confirm that its reorganization will not affect its existing storage OEM deals. "We still have a great relationship with Hitachi, as well as LSI," said Fowler, explaining that the firms "have a rich roadmap of products that will be delivered over the next 12 months."Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.