Sun Microsystems acquired Storage Technology (StorageTek) for $4.1 billion in cash last week in a bid to bolster its ILM (information
lifecycle management) strategy.
“With Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and other compliance issues, storage and data management are becoming more and more important,”
said Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun.
StorageTek will bring its tape libraries and tape and disk drives to Sun’s larger disk-array systems.
The deal shows Sun is serious about storage, but it may not improve Sun’s competitive position.
“You have to pull off a good merger, and that’s never easy for anyone,” said Tony Asaro, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy
Group.
Asaro also said the two companies are developing competitors to EMC’s Celerra content-addressed storage array.