A new Sun set to rise on storage

You don't very often see an emotional farewell like the one the new CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, delivered saluting former CEO Scott McNealy.

Try reading that speech in its entirety because it reveals some precious insights on private aspects of the character of both men that many outsiders (I, for one) may have never guessed.

Schwartz's salute touches on some of the most vibrant milestones in computing of the past 15 or 20 years. Those milestones had so much influence on the lives of many people, either working in the IT industry or not: the ascent of the Windows OS; the general, worldwide acceptance of Java; and the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

Looking back, Sun was the first company to connect a box of disks to a server using fibre links -- but it allowed other vendors to eat its storage lunch. Isn't it also ironic that the company that preached to everybody that "the network is the computer" did not extend the same leadership to storage, which is a major component of that network?

Maybe that's changing: A vibrant message came out on Tuesday from Sun's Network Computing 2006 event, declaring that the company is now (finally) looking at storage as a network resource. Here's what McNealy had to say on that:

"In the Participation Age, I believe storage is going to be a network resource. Instead of carrying it around in your briefcase, or your laptop, or on your iPod, it's going to be a network resource, it's going to be accessible anytime, anyplace, from any device, by anyone with the proper authentication and the proper identification."

Sun made several major announcements at the Network Computing event, covering several new products and services, but perhaps the most interesting takeaway was its new storage strategy.

Building systems that are trustworthy, simple to manage, access-protected, and have value for the customers are the four elements of that strategy, according to Mark Canepa, executive vice president of the data management group at Sun, in a conversation we had a few days before the event.

"We believe that a lot of customers' applications are going to run on the grid, and some are already running on the grid today," Canepa continues. "Having thousands of applications running in a grid environment means that we have to provide a storage system that is consistent with that."

Care to know how Sun's going to do that? Canepa is quick to explain that virtualization is the key to keeping storage manageable in a grid environment: "We are probably leading the virtualization in the storage crowd. If you look at the [Sun StorageTek] 9000, we can already create over 8,000 LUNs [logical unit numbers]. In the future, we'll make that number grow a lot."

Incidentally, expect to see the StorageTek name more often because from now on it will become the brand name of all Sun storage products.