The Open Road

Sun Microsystems spent a decade getting pummeled by lower-cost, commodity Linux servers. It wants to spend the next decade doing the same to its storage rivals.

I spent time talking with Sun executives over the past few days and was surprised by the intensity and focus the Sun team is bringing to its storage commoditization play. For years Sun has been (often rightly) derided for lacking focus and being stuck in a proprietary UNIX past. It has reorganized its business units as often as some people change clothes.

But I genuinely sense a different Sun is in motion now. With projects like FISHworks (Fully Integrated Software and Hardware), Sun wants to change the economics of the storage industry just as its server rivals once did to it. Ashlee Vance of The New York Times reported this shift in Sun strategy last September, but few others have taken adequate notice.

If you have 90 percent of the features most people want and you win big on price/performance, then you can be very disruptive.

That's the opinion of Mike Shapiro, a distinguished engineer at Sun, and it's one I believe deserves more attention.

It's easy to write off Sun's chances, but consider: Sun has a tremendously deep engineering talent pool with a history of producing exceptional hardware and software. Its back against the Wall Street wall, Sun now has an economic incentive to take big risks on open source/commodity business models. It also has a long memory of how its proprietary server business was pulverized by Linux in the past decade.

Sun sees storage as the next big market demanding commodity economics, and this time it wants to be the one to put the squeeze to its competitors. This, along with Sun's Open Web initiative, make Sun a dangerous competitor, precisely because its competitors have so much to lose even as Sun makes big, risky bets.

Who would have thought that storage could be so sexy?

In a recent blog post, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's brainy CEO, makes a valiant effort to show how storage can be innovative, cost efficient, and, yes, sexy. I think he succeeds, and I'm the first to admit I don't think much about storage (until I run out of it).

Talking up Sun's newest open storage device, the very blandly named Sun Storage 7000, Schwartz compares storage to the book market in his neighborhood:

The 7000 has one remarkably interesting attribute: it learns. The longer it's doing its job, interacting with applications and serving data, the faster it becomes. How it accomplishes this relates to the bookstores I first discussed....

It's common sense: if you put the bestsellers on the first shelf a visitor sees when they walk in the door, they're more likely to buy one than if you put them in alphabetical order around the store. As the bestsellers change, so do your promotions and displays - if you adapt to demand, you capture more of it. That's the basic premise behind the 7000, to use systems innovation to drive performance, eliminate latency and radically cut purchase and operating cost.

That behavior might make a bookstore less beloved in my neighborhood, but it makes Sun more beloved in the datacenter. And it makes the 7000 a great candidate to be one of the storage industry's best sellers.

Sun's open storage business is booming, demonstrating the innovation (through commoditization of hardware, of all things) still commands customer interest. As Sun shows more of its "innovation through commoditization" hand, I suspect both customers and Wall Street will perk up to its story.

Sun has not set.

In fact, it may well be the perfect company to showcase how customers can both save and spend through the recession, the perfect antidote to our global recession. Open source provides a way to spend on the initiatives needed by IT while simultaneously saving precious dollars (or Euros, or whatever currency you please). Save while you spend. That's open source, and it's a strategy Sun is putting to good use in its open storage product line.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been doomed to serve as the resident Thanksgiving roast for the media, but apparently he didn't get the memo. Instead he's trumpeting the dramatic growth of Sun's MySQL and Open Storage initiatives:

Like Wikipedia, most of the planet's largest web sites (just look at the top 100) are built atop Sun's MySQL database. Which is why we've just introduced a line of systems platform designed specifically to run MySQL - at up to 3x the performance of whitebox alternatives (after all, it's far easier marketing to audiences that have already chosen Sun). We're now expanding those offerings with our newest Open Storage portfolio, as well - built to run ZFS from 5 to 50x traditional performance. And again, all such systems are available here for free trial - pick the system you want to try, we'll cover shipping costs to and from your site.

Open Storage grew 150 percent last quarter, which is great, but still small ($25 million). I still think Sun might do well to carve out a few businesses and focus on open source but, as Techdirt notes, Sun may well need software to serve as a "loss leader" for its hardware and services business.

We'll see. Interesting times for Sun. From conversations I've had with various executives there, I think Sun still has a fighting chance. It needs to execute, but Schwartz at least has the right ideas about where and how it needs to execute.

Despite a recent write-down on the value of its StorageTek acquisition, Sun is banking on updates to its open-storage initiative to drive revenue growth for the company, according to The Wall Street Journal. Is it putting too much faith in storage, and open-source storage at that, to repair its fortunes?

For me, it's not a question of whether Sun's open-storage business is viable, but whether it's big enough to save Sun in time. In other words, as the Journal points out, open storage is growing at a torrid pace, but will it be enough?

Sun's open storage line includes a hybrid server-storage machine called Thumper, introduced two years ago. Sales of such products are a small bright spot for a company beset lately by declining revenue. In the first fiscal quarter ended in September, for example, Sun reported $25 million in open-storage sales -- nearly triple the amount in the year-earlier period -- while Sun's total revenue declined 7% to $2.99 billion. "Certainly open storage is one of the bright spots in the storage industry," says John Fowler, executive vice president for systems at Sun.

It's during times like this that Sun would do better as a private company. It really needs some time away from Wall Street's unblinking eye so that it can turn the ship around.

With initiatives like open storage and open-source MySQL, Sun has demonstrated that it knows how to grow again. The major remaining question, however, is whether it will be fast enough to appease Wall Street. As an open-source proponent and Sun fan, I hope the answer is 'Yes.'