Related Items »   Sun/StorageTek Details and Resources

In June 2005, Sun announced that it would acquire StorageTek, setting off a flurry of discussion around why Sun made this move and what it means strategically. Now, six weeks after the deal's closing, Sun Data Management Group Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer James Whitemore discusses the reasons for Sun's purchase of StorageTek and highlights why customers benefit from this marriage.

Q: Why did Sun acquire StorageTek and why is this a strategic move?

A: We've been working on the StorageTek acquisition for over 12 months. The move stems from the fact that we understand the strategic importance of storage and data management in a systems environment. How you store, manage, and protect information is critical.

Sun is a network computing company and our mission has not wavered for the last 20+ years. Our vision is everyone and everything participating on the network. This ties to storage in that you have to be able to store your data in a secure, shared environment. If you accept this vision, then data must be shared across that complex network computing environment in secure and trusted ways.

Achieving this requires massive experience in the storage arena. You need to understand everything that happens to data and information as it works in the system. There are three primary things that you have to think about.

1. You have to think about data as it travels through the system. This includes file systems, policy engines, network fabrics, etc.
2. You have to think about how data works in the system — how it interacts with applications, how it is turned into information, and how value is assigned to it.
3. You have to think about data at rest. When you know that data is valuable, but you don't need it in the production environment, you have to put it to rest.

This resting data is becoming increasingly important as organizations build up huge repositories of information. There are increasing compliance and regulatory requirements for companies to keep data. Separately, the concept of deleting data is rapidly going away. Companies don't want to delete data — whether from their own business regulations or from understanding that data has potential long-term value. This non-production data is held as a corporate asset and a huge scale of data repository needs to be built to handle it. You have to protect it, store it, and manage the security and integrity of that data.

Sun understands the importance of harvesting those big data repositories and sharing them across complex network computing environments. For these reasons we bought StorageTek, because it is undoubtedly the world leader in the long-term archiving of data, and by bringing that expertise into Sun it expands our capabilities.

Q: Why does an executive care about storage?

A: Your information is the most important business asset you have. Information gives you the power you need to make intelligent decisions - decisions that impact the direction of your organization and its future. Without ready access to relevant, secure data, your exposure to risk intensifies and you're left to make key decisions in a vacuum. With information at the heart of all networks, the greatest challenge facing organizations is managing data efficiently and securely to:

• Grow your business by leveraging information assets
• Reduce costs through improved data management, efficiencies, and scalability
• Mitigate risk and enable business resiliency and compliance

Q: How concerned should executives be about the growing need for more storage? What are the forces driving this need?

A: The biggest concern is scaling. How do your information repositories scale? If you are managing 20 terabytes today, you will be managing 30 terabytes next year. This is a huge growth rate. The solutions you are choosing now, the architectures you are implementing now, need to scale to cope with that huge growth rate.

A second concern should be the security of information. Information is worthless and is a huge liability if it's not secure. Security is about how you protect access to that information, who has access to what information, and what they are doing with it. These issues become extremely critical as we look at building out large-scale data archives. So scaling, security, and information access are all incredibly important. So is performance. Five minutes to retrieve data from an archive is probably not acceptable to most businesses.

There are so many new factors which are driving the requirements to retain data, including video surveillance, citizen records, and regulatory compliance. At the end of the day though, you can't escape the fact that all of this combined is driving data retention rates up by about 50 to 70 percent per year.

Q: How does Sun plan to ensure that this acquisition is successful?

A: StorageTek and Sun are obviously two very different companies. StorageTek is very focused on the long-term archiving of data. Sun is focused on network computing, and in terms of data management and storage, our concern is around how to put data to work in complex network computing environments, and how to manage the interaction between data, applications, and computational platforms.

We have partnered in the past with companies including StorageTek to manage the long-term archival data. Our focus over the last 25 years has been all about data at work in computational platforms. The coming-together of these two companies unleashes an enormous amount of synergy with two different ways of thinking about storage. One is about data at work, the other is about data at rest, and together these build a fantastic portfolio.

There are four key things that we are focused on as we integrate the two companies. The first is about maintaining innovation. Sun's innovation is around data work and computational platforms, the link between applications and data, and how you move data around in a large-scale network-computing environment. StorageTek's innovation is around long-term archiving of data. By combining the focus on both those areas, we'll continue to be an innovator across that stack of storage in data management.

A second focus area is around having a broad, heterogeneous portfolio. Now that Sun and StorageTek are joining forces, Sun's robust and open portfolio including leading-edge solutions in areas such as security, encryption, identity management, data protection, access management, and disaster recovery is being combined with the infrastructure and solutions of StorageTek — the company that manages more of the world's archived digital data than any other company on the planet. Together our portfolio of storage and data management offerings provides the greatest choice and flexibility in the industry today.

The third key piece is on data center expertise. StorageTek has 35 years of experience meeting the requirements of large-scale data center customers. We want to maintain that expertise, keeping distinct and discrete service organizations that understand the product portfolio and customers' requirements in that area.

The fourth area is about two world-class service and support organizations coming together. StorageTek's global support organization is accustomed to handling the needs of the most demanding mainframe customers' data centers. This, combined with Sun's expertise with open systems environments and complex network computing environments, will come together to build a low-cost sales and support organization. The breadth of the product portfolio that we are now able to offer will set us apart and show that this integration is successful.

Q: Why is this acquisition good for customers?

A: This is good for customers in that it brings together two forces in the industry who are very much drivers of open standards. StorageTek has no specific computational operating system alliances — it is an open system storage company. Combine that with a focus on supporting customer choice in complex network heterogeneous computing environments, and you have a formidable industry force driving open standards across storage and data management.

One of the most important things is that we will jointly be a company focused on security — a world leader around identity management with Solaris, one of the most secure operating environments on the planet. Everything that we do is built around security and we're coming together with a company that truly understands how that relates to the long-term archiving of data. This is very beneficial for our customers.

Q: Why are some analysts skeptical?

A: They don't see Sun as a storage company and some wonder why we would purchase a company whose key product set is tape storage. In actuality, Sun's storage business has been very critical for well over a decade. From the beginning, we understood the importance of making data management work within computational platforms and the applications running on them. We invented network file systems (NFS), which is now the industry standard for file sharing in open systems environments. We pioneered many aspects of file systems and have products with the industry's most scalable high-performance 128-bit file systems.

It's all about moving data around in complex network environments at high speed. While we are not a storage company per se, we understand the importance of engineering a data management strategy as part of an overall system strategy. So while some analysts are skeptical about that, we believe we are on the right track. We believe that approaching storage from a systems point of view is really the only way to successfully build out a large-scale secure data management architecture.

Q: How is the integration going?

A: It has been an interesting challenge — this is the largest integration project that we've ever undertaken. We're seeking advice and support from external groups, from peers around the industry, and we think it's going well. The momentum, the motivation, and the enthusiasm from both sides are huge. The StorageTek engineering and sales groups are meeting with their counterparts at Sun to find areas of leverage and synergy. The sales teams are excited about having new product portfolios and the engineering groups are coming together to determine a common approach to thinking about data management.

Q: What will executives need to worry about 2-5 years out with regard to storage?

A: Security, compliance, and the assurance that your information is protected are crucial in today's business environment. As information is migrated to various storage resources over its lifecycle, secure authorization and access rights must be maintained. This is particularly true in organizations subject to access and control requirements that are driven by compliance and corporate governance mandates. Sun's identity management solutions securely manage identity profiles and permissions throughout the lifecycle of your data.

Over the foreseeable future data growth will continue to challenge businesses. To manage this growth, executives should expect and demand open standards from all the vendors they work with. Sun's open portfolio of solutions provides you considerable flexibility and choice you need for the future.

Q: Looking at the storage industry over the next couple of years, do you have any predictions as to what it will look like?

A: I think consolidation in the industry will continue. Sun and StorageTek's coming together creates a new major force in the industry — the third or fourth largest depending on which market you look at, but certainly a top-tier storage company. I think consolidation will continue because there are many small companies dealing with compliance, file systems, and the complexities of managing huge data repositories. I believe the players emerging at the top of the industry now will be consistent for the next four or five years and it's great to be one of those.

As the scale of repositories grows — again, around 50 percent per year — people won't be able to afford to spend 50 percent more per year to manage it. We need to break the linkage between capacity and pricing in the storage industry, and think much more about service levels, security levels, and performance levels as the metrics which drive pricing. I believe the focus of the industry will move away from the physical storage device toward abstracted data services. Just as an operating system is abstracted from a computational platform, storage will become abstracted from the physical storage devices. There will be common tools which are used across multiple vendors, storage to manage resources, security, and access to information, and I think you will see Sun take a leadership role in growing that across the industry.

About James Whitemore
James Whitemore is vice president and chief marketing officer of the Data Management Group at Sun Microsystems. He is responsible for the global marketing of all of Sun's data storage solutions, including StorEdge- and StorageTek-branded hardware, software and appliances.

James has a long history in the storage industry. He joined Sun in the U.K. in 1997 as a product marketing director, and subsequently has spent time in a variety of marketing and sales leadership roles in North America and Asia Pacific. Prior to Sun, James spent more than a decade in marketing, sales, and business development roles in Europe with StorageTek and IBM's storage division. He holds an honors degree in Business Studies from the University of Newcastle in the U.K.