One year after the acquisition of StorageTek, I had the opportunity to chat with Eula Adams, Sun senior vice president of Sun Microsystems Global Storage Practice. He and his team provide a "line of sight" from the Storage Product Group to ensure that Sun's R&D investments achieve maximum return. "Flawless Execution" is the Storage Practice mantra.

Eula is a member of Sun's leadership team and a former StorageTek senior executive. Prior to his joining StorageTek in 2004, he was a member of the executive management committee at First Data Corporation for more than 13 years.

Jones: What advantages do Sun customers gain from the acquisition of StorageTek?

Adams: When Sun acquired StorageTek, it added a brand that has built a solid reputation as an aftermarket solutions provider. We have preserved the attributes and assets that built StorageTek's loyal customer base and are offering additional archive solutions and disk systems. Separately, Sun and StorageTek were partners well before the acquisition and shared many of the same enterprise customers.

Where we didn't, today we are introducing legacy STK customers to Sun's innovative breakthrough technologies and end-to-end solutions for the datacenter, the department, and the labs — wherever secure, reliable and accessible data management is required. So, customers are guaranteed the solid services and products they relied on before the acquisition, with the technology and innovation of a full-service computing partner.

Jones: Managing the explosion of content on campus is one of the biggest challenges facing a university CIO today. From the digital archiving and preservation of a library's content archive to real-time Web access to course materials and student records, our customers are struggling to provide 24/7 availability. With stretched budgets and even thinner IT resources, outages due to nature or human error can quickly become a disaster. What differentiates Sun solutions in the areas of disaster recovery and content management?

Adams: When a disaster strikes or for routine campus operations, data must be protected, archived, and shared by everyone and everything on a network. This requires continuous protection in an eco-responsible manner — "eco" meaning both economics and ecology, both effective power usage and total cost of ownership.

The Storage business at Sun contains a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for our customers to meet their data management needs — a mix of Sun intellectual property and partner products. Unlike some of our competitors, we fully believe that tape is required by most of our customers for long-term, cost-effective data archival.

We employ a "bookend" strategy to continue our growth and leadership today and in next generation storage platforms with tape and breakthrough products built on Sun technology, including leadership in long term archive with our tape intellectual property and partnering for a best of breed disk portfolio. Sun provides an open interoperable stack from the disk up through the application to enable customers to choose best-of-class components for their solution.

Jones: Market leadership demands innovation, and Sun has maintained its position at the forefront of enterprise storage technology by continuing to develop products tailored to meet emerging customer needs. What can our Education customers expect from Sun in the future?

Adams: Moving forward, Sun will continue to introduce new storage paradigms with breakthrough products such as Honeycomb — a searchable storage database! Imagine the savings from having your archived data securely stored but instantly accessible AND searchable based on the rules and needs of your business.

There's Project Blackbox — a datacenter in a box that can be drop-shipped, so to speak, at disaster sites, customer locations where additional IT capacity is needed, in locations where real estate is more affordable, and at sites that need to be cognizant of their power usage and other impacts on the environment — which is just about any place these days. And Solaris — the trusted operating system that runs everything from our desktops to our servers to our large virtual tape libraries.

It was great to catch up with Eula Adams. Eula and his team can help you choose from our broad portfolio of road-tested consulting, implementation, support, managed and educational services to make sure we match the right services to your data management needs. From a point product to a holistic approach and from reactive to proactive measures — we see the small details and the big picture.

Education customers are looking to Sun to deliver effective, cost-efficient storage and retrieval of massive quantities of data. Both Sun and StorageTek companies had provided pieces of the solution. With Sun's acquisition of StorageTek, the combined company is uniquely able to provide the complete solution. Now, only Sun can provide a continuum of solutions that marry disk and tape storage with innovative data management software on the secure Solaris OS platform.

Contact Eula's team today to get started.

Sincerely yours,

Kim Jones
VP, Global Education, Government, and Health Sciences

Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com