Important Things 1999

IT1999:

SUN Microsystems Inc. has more value?

What SUN has, I know the following,

1. Java, a wonderful invent, just like http or www

2. MySQL, more and more customers, especially Web2.0

3. Solaric & SPARC, best OS and CPU ever.

4. StorageTek, physical tape library, or robotic. Now VTL(Virtual Tape Library) is prevailing.

5. Storage(HDS), Backup management(Symantic),……

6. Market share

Why IBM want to buy SUN?

1. IBM is promoting Java

2. IBM supports MySQL, but more focus on its DB2. MySQL has lots of Web installation, it’s an advantage.

3. IBM has a great OS, AIX.

4. IBM has VTL, why not buy ADIC to obtain PTL?

5. IBM has Shark and XIV, and Tivoli, a powerful management system, also comprehensive and complicated software.

6. Don’t know

IBM wants SUN, so it will have no competitor in future. Only SUN has the power to develop large server except IBM himself. It’s time to using LARGE server, because we have used distribution system or small host/server for several years.

Why large server? The answer can be found in IBM, VMware,…….., and SUN

Distribution–>concentration–>Distribution–>concentration–>Distribution–>concentration–>……..

This is what IBM told us in the passed years, what’s difference in future?

IBM advocates a concept, the world follows up.

Now we really need LARGE server for IBM will say.

The following content is copied from SearchStorage.com

IBM reportedly wants Sun for $6.5B

By Dave Raffo, Senior News Director
18 Mar 2009 | SearchStorage.com

News and trends in the storage industry
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Sun Microsystems Inc. is for sale and IBM Corp. is negotiating to acquire its rival for at least $6.5 billion, according to a story today in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Storage is hardly the main driver of the talks, but if the deal goes through it would let IBM consolidate the enterprise tape library market and extend the open-source model that Sun has embraced.

There has been talk for months that Sun is looking to sell itself or at least parts of its storage business.

If the WSJ story is correct, the biggest surprise of the deal would be the price tag. The $6.5 billion figure is approximately twice what Sun was worth before news of the deal leaked, and there doesn’t appear to be any other serious suitors. The WSJ story said Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. passed on Sun. Last year’s rumors said EMC Corp. was interested, but EMC president and CEO Joe Tucci has downplayed any talk of acquiring companies that are close in size to his own.

[Open storage]may be the first thing that Sun did right for storage in decades.
John Webster
Principal IT advisor, Illuminata Inc.

Sun, which lost $209 million in the last quarter of 2008, has been in a steady decline for years, and a change in CEO from Scott McNealy to Jonathan Schwartz three years ago failed to alter its fortunes. Storage has been a weak spot for years, leading Sun to its Open Storage initiative, which has resulted in interesting new products and some customer notice, if not many sales.

Kaushik Roy, senior analyst, data center technologies at San Francisco-based Pacific Growth Equities LLC, said a sale makes sense for Sun, but he doesn’t expect any other serious bidders.

“Sun, as it stands now, is likely to shrink,” Roy said. “It’s better for Sun shareholders to sell Sun to someone else. [But] $6.5 billion seems expensive in this kind of market.”

On the storage side, Sun still has the tape business it acquired with StorageTek for $4.1 billion in 2005, but its disk storage comes mainly from OEM partners – Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) in the enterprise, LSI (also an IBM disk OEM partner) in the midrange, and Dot Hill Systems Corp. for entry-level systems.

Buying Sun would give IBM a lock on the enterprise tape market, but that shrinking market is unlikely the impetus for a multibillion dollar deal.

“IBM is going to get the tape market, but do you really want a shrinking business?” Roy said. “Sun’s storage systems business is a waste. At the high end, you just kick out HDS. Midrange and entry level, you just kill it.”

John Webster, principal IT advisor at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc., agreed with Roy about tape, but thinks Sun’s open-source storage can be valuable to IBM. Sun launched its Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems in January, which is based on open-source software.

“IBM would consolidate Sun’s tape operations with its own,” Webster said. “But they’re not going to pay $ 6.5 billion and expect tape to add value to the acquisition. Open-systems disk could be very attractive to [IBM], particularly on the storage software side.

Webster said Sun’s open-source strategy is paying off with customers. “They’re starting to get a lot of serious attention with that product,” he said. “It may be the first thing that Sun did right for storage in decades.”

Webster also said the current economic conditions present an opportunity for open-source storage that might not be there in better times. “The commercial buyer is now in a way forced to look at open-source alternatives because of price,” he said. “Sun has held steadfastly to this model. It was a risky model from the beginning, and if it doesn’t work now, it’s not going to work.”

IT1999: CISCO is selling server NOW! What else CISCO can do. CISCO, Everywhere, maybe soon.

The following content is copied from http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/ipstorage/news/article.php/3810666

EMC, NetApp Could Gain From Cisco’s Server Plans

March 17, 2009
By Paul Shread

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is pushing its vision of converged data center fabrics to a new level with the new Unified Computing System — and is threatening to shake up the data storage market in the process.

The new systems, which unite servers, networks and storage in a single platform, could provide a big boost for the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard and for data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC), whose VMware (NYSE: VMW) subsidiary is central to Cisco’s new offering.

In addition to VMware, EMC’s Smarts and ControlCenter server, network and storage management tools are also part of the collaboration. EMC and Cisco said in a statement that they “will focus on discovery and dependency mapping, automated root cause analysis and policy-based configuration management.”

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) is another potential winner. Along with EMC, NetApp was mentioned as a data storage partner for Cisco’s new offering.

Patrick Rogers, NetApp’s vice president for solutions marketing, said the company’s strength in Ethernet-based storage made it a natural partner for Cisco. He said NetApp believes that Ethernet will become the preferred data center fabric, and he had praise for Cisco’s interconnect, storage access layer and integrated management technologies. NetApp and Cisco will collaborate on a variety of virtualization and consolidation offerings for servers, desktops and applications.

Emulex (NYSE: ELX) and QLogic (NASDAQ: QLGC) are also Cisco UCS storage partners.

On the competitive side of the picture, the announcement threatens to turn Cisco’s rivalry with Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) up another notch, as the two have been at the forefront of storage and network switch vendors positioning for converged data center fabrics.

Brocade was dismissive of Cisco’s efforts, saying in a statement that Cisco’s approach to unified computing “is not revolutionary. Many companies with extensive experience, including Brocade, in solving complex data center issues are already working on solutions.”

Brocade said Cisco’s approach “is likely to be very capital-intensive up front,” and the company said that converged data centers should be “tackled by a broad ecosystem of industry partners and not based on a proprietary singular architecture of one company.”

Analysts Weigh In On Cisco’s UCS

Analysts also had much to say about Cisco’s bold entry into the server market.

Enterprise Strategy Group analysts Mark Bowker, Steve Duplessie and Jon Oltsik wrote that Cisco’s platform joins storage and network I/O traffic through the UCS Fabric Interconnect.

“While this technology depends upon Cisco’s proprietary Data Center Ethernet (DCE), it does eliminate the need for a separate Fibre Channel infrastructure,” they wrote.

UCS uses an FCoE network that “roughly equates to a top of the rack system” yet “scales well beyond a single rack,” they said. The system doesn’t use Cisco’s Nexus 5000 switches or 2000 series fabric extenders, but instead uses customized equipment called the Fabric Interconnect and Fabric Extender to route traditional LAN and SAN traffic to core IP and FC networks.

While major server vendors like IBM (NYSE: IBM), HP (NYSE: HPQ), Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) can’t be pleased that a major partner has become a competitor, the analysts said they expect HP and IBM to create new alliances with the likes of Brocade/Foundry and Juniper (NASDAQ: JNPR) to “diminish their reliance on Cisco.”

Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO Group, said that while FCoE is still in the early adopter phase, “for those who need it and can afford it, it has a primary market opportunity for aggregating server ports to fan in to traditional SANs,” at least until it becomes a proven technology for mission-critical applications.

Taneja Group analyst Dave Bartoletti said the announcement is “significant because Cisco has acknowledged that virtualization is the new unifying data center architecture. … This is quite an admission, and confirms that virtualization has won.”

But Bartoletti said the product itself “is a sort of anti-virtualization strategy. They’ve gathered up several virtualization technologies and wrapped them in a Cisco box. Everything inside will be Cisco developed or chosen. Vendors will have to squeeze in between the big invited partners in order to craft any added-value solutions, and Cisco will decide who’s allowed in.”

Virtualization, Bartoletti said, “broke tightly coupled components apart and in doing so created a new class of solution opportunities. VMware competes with its partners to fill these new needs, but has no lock on any one. Every tier of a virtualized infrastructure is vulnerable to replacement.

“It seems to me that Cisco and its huge partners now want to gather the best of these solutions up, package them, and tell customers, ‘don’t waste time or money crafting a virtualization solution from parts. We’ve put the best together already.’ I’m not convinced that’s going to win hearts and minds any more successfully than Microsoft did when it tried to package web browsing as a ‘feature’ of Windows.”