Schwartz: Sun to focus on storage business

Sun Microsystems plans to increase its focus on storage through a major internal reorganization, the company's chief executive has announced.

Writing on his blog on Monday, Jonathan Schwartz revealed the planned merger of Sun's server and storage teams into a converged systems team. The move, he wrote, would take advantage of Sun's existing "talent and assets" in its push into the ever-expanding storage market--a market set to be increasingly indistinguishable from the server world thanks to virtualization.

"The systems team will focus on the evolution and convergence of computing, storage and networking systems," Schwartz wrote. "Talk to any data-center administrator, and that's what they want to hear--they live in a world managing the (often idiosyncratic) interactions of that trinity (computing, storage and networking--and just wait until they're virtualized). We want to be in a position to innovate on their behalf, at the system level, beyond the boxes--across blades, racks, disk and tape."

Schwartz also reiterated Sun's enthusiasm for tape as a long-term storage medium: "In our view, the market for permanent data will only grow. Today, only tape can maintain the integrity of that data without electricity. And, for the data centers we serve, many are seeing the cost of electricity threatening to eclipse their hardware budgets (yes, I'm serious). For disk storage, over a decade, that's easy to see--just look at the power bill to run a SAN."

"Tape, with effective indexing and retrieval, represents the most economically responsible (that is, eco-responsible) archive platform for long-term storage. Broadly speaking, tape (and, in the future, other forms of removable media) are a core part of Sun's archive plans," Schwartz wrote.

Sun announced in August that it would lay off some of its workforce during the second half of this year. But it remains unclear how many job losses have already occurred and how many affect its server and storage teams.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[sal-magnone]

More confusion at Sun

I get it; that's why they changed their ticker to 'JAVA'. Wait a minute ...

I'm just wondering if anyone at Sun talks to anyone else. This is painful.

[scdecade]

Deja vu all over again

Guess they flubbed yet another quarter of sales.

[MidOne]

Focus (on storage) looking into the "Sun"

One should ask Jonathan about the organizational move. Seems to
me if Storage was really the focus that the VP of Systems (John
Fowler) would be reporting to the VP of Storage (Jon Benson). In
reality it's the other way around. This looks a lot more like Sun
trying to find another place to sell things that include their
processors and operating system.

[kalison1]

Hey, Sun up 25 cents today

Must be something right about this announcement...Sun stock jumped 25 cents today and finished at over 6 bucks a share.

Rarified stock price for sure.