I was a bit surprised when CEO Jonathan Schwartz revealed in a blog posting last week his intention for Sun Microsystems to begin selling networking gear. Not because the news was unexpected, but because of the fact that the announcement was made in his blog rather than in a formal product announcement or press release.
As I've said before, general purpose microprocessors and operating systems are now fast enough to eliminate the need for special purpose devices. That means you can build a router out of a server - notice you cannot build a server out of a router, try as hard as you like. The same applies to storage devices.
To demonstrate this point, we now build our entire line of storage systems from general purpose server parts, including Solaris and ZFS, our open source file system. This allows us to innovate in software, where others have to build custom silicon or add cost. We are planning a similar line of networking platforms, based around the silicon and software you can already find in our portfolio.
(Emphasis mine.)
Schwartz goes on to argue that Sun's combination of hardware and systems software built on Solaris and ZFS are the right combination to disrupt the networking and storage markets with a general purpose computing platform that is more cost effective than proprietary closed systems, presumably from the likes of Cisco, Netapp and others. No doubt customers who are used to paying for high 60-70% margin products are going to be interested to see whether Sun's approach can lead to commoditization of these markets to drive prices down.
Some bloggers are wondering whether Sun is planning on taking on Cisco.
Is Sun preparing to take on Cisco? Is Sun getting ready to try to use commodity hardware and open source software to penetrate the networking market in the same way that they are using commodity hardware and open source software to try to further penetrate the storage market with their open storage products (in particular, the 7000 series)?
Given that Cisco is preparing to announce it's entry into the blade market, as part of a unified data center push, it could make for an interesting situation. Get your popcorn...
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