In his most recent blog Jonathan Schwartz reviews developments in the storage segment of Sun's product family. He cites several developments, including the acquisition of MySQL, discussions on flash memory, archiving, the Lustre parallel file system, each of which is contributing to Sun's efforts at increasing its prominence as a provider of storage solutions.

Schwartz decried the common objection to open source applications in mission critical settings, noting that Sun provides 24x7 commercial support for ZFS on both Sun and Dell hardware and bolstering that assertion with the prediction from Gartner that soon 90% of the world's companies would be running open source software.

Schwartz reported having pointed out to an industry analyst that Sun is already seeing the expected payoff in its open source offerings.

He added the information that Sun had delivered some 90 petabytes of storage in the form of ZFS Thumper which offer roughly twice the capacity in half the space at half the cost of the competition - $1.20/Gigabyte.

Schwartz predicts that open storage systems, built from commodity parts and open source software, will grow at a rate faster than solutions in the proprietary storage market. He says that Sun will offer a tremendous amount of storage innovation in response to customer demand for better/faster/cheaper/smaller options. "Expect to see flash, ZFS, dtrace, and good old fashioned systems engineering play a very prominent role in an aggressive push into the storage market." he writes.

In fact, given the finding just announced by IDC, this effort too is paying off as expected, as Sun customers are reported to be growing their disk storage business with Sun far faster than with any of the company's proprietary competition. And at three times the rate of the overall market's growth.

Schwartz offers his readers worldwide the opportunity to take Thumper for a free trial run risk free for 60 days.

Schwartz notes that he explained to the earlier mentioned analyst that there is a clear "linkage between open innovation and revenue growth." [...read more...]

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