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What's in Stor[age] at Sun for 2008? EVP John Fowler Shares His Thoughts
Sun EVP John Fowler shared his perspective on storage issues at the company with SearchStorage.com recently and spoke of his expectations for 2008. Thumper was of interest to SearchStorage.com and Fowler responded by declaring that the promise lies with such applications as video surveillance and backup and archive. Technical computing also looked good to Fowler in connection with Thumper. The recent acquisition of Cluster File Systems will show payoff in connection with Thumper and technical computing, he promised. Fowler foresees Thumper as becoming both more powerful and as moving downmarket. With regard to Sun's becoming a supplier to Web 2.0 computing farms, SearchStorage.com wanted to know the implications for Sun's RAID arrays. Fowler answered, saying that, with ZFS, it was possible to produce very high performance disk arrays that did not involve RAID technology and, therefore, saw no developing issues on that score. Fowler also mentioned Sun's arrangement with Hitachi Data Systems as useful in this connection. Would Sun exploit the SMB market, SearchStorage.com wondered, with product lines geared toward them. Fowler suggested Sun would not, given that even large companies buy an entire range of product. "We don't see enriching the portfolio, from a price point standpoint, to be just an SMB play. We have major customers of Thumper using them for backup or surveillance -- don't necessarily associate price point with size," he explained. Furthermore, Sun has no current plans to develop storage virtualization product below the StorageTek 9000 series since customer interest is being directed toward either partially populated 9000s or the 6140 and 6540. As for NAS, Fowler suggested that the 5320 NAS product was expected to meet customer needs, along with the use of the Solaris OS as a platform usable for NAS. "We've recently integrated a fully multithreaded CIFS implementation into OpenSolaris as well as NDMP for interfaced applications. One of the other functions that people are very excited about is the ability to run applications directly on an open platform. You'll also be able to run any size head end that you want, so you're not really limited on head-end size compared to proprietary NAS companies," he added. Fowler said he looked to software people to tailor Sun's prepackaged NAS products to particular situations.
Finally, SearchStorage wanted to know Sun's stance on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Fowler responded by saying Sun was represented on the FCoE committee and is actively working on that standard. "There are actually a lot of things going on. There's also Fibre Channel over InfiniBand and Ethernet over InfiniBand, and we're actively involved with those, as well. I think if we can actually get the number of data center networks down, then it does simplify things for customers and ultimately reduces their cost, and we're all for that. I think the only thing is, we want to make sure that these are going to be truly open standards that anyone can implement because it doesn't help the cause if they're proprietary. I think Fibre Channel over Ethernet is going to take a lot longer than Fibre Channel over InfiniBand because there are so many changes to Ethernet that have to happen before [FCoE] will work."
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We want to make sure that these are going to be truly open standards that anyone can implement because it doesn't help the cause if they're proprietary. 
What's in Stor[age] at Sun for 2008?
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