While everyone else was watching the Apple iPad intro I was watching Oracle’s John Fowler talk about their systems and storage strategy. I like the iPad, but the O+S strategy could reshape the storage industry.
More details will emerge and many decisions still remain but the basic elements are clear:
- Focus on direct sales. In the mid-1990s, when I joined Sun, the tenacity and aggressiveness of their direct sales force was a welcome change. Direct sales forces are expensive, but losing touch with your customers is even costlier. The combo’s unique value propositions can’t be sold by channels today. In 5 years – maybe.
- A dedicated storage sales force. Generalist salespeople with millimeter deep storage product and application knowledge can’t compete with EMC and NetApp. Storage specialists aren’t easy to develop, so they’ll hire them – and they promise top commissions.
- Deep integration of ZFS into storage systems. A software company should like a software solution to many of the biggest storage problems? Putting real muscle behind ZFS will help thousands of enterprise customers to rethink their high-performance data protection strategies.
- Flash everywhere. Sun has done some creative things with flash already, such as Logzilla, and Oracle sees that much more can be done.
Not mentioned – not that it should have been – is the fate of ZFS on Mac OS X. That would be a boost for all concerned.
The StorageMojo take
Sun’s primary storage business has been a black smoking crater of disaster for over a decade. And it didn’t help StorageTek to have them answer to know-nothings.
Despite that Sun engineers outside the storage group developed innovative and game-changing technologies that the company couldn’t capitalize on. With Oracle’s investment now they can.
No database/systems company can be successful without a healthy and very competitive storage team — and the high gross margins don’t hurt. With a hard-nosed focus on application performance, marketing competence and continued innovation, the O+S storage group could be a fun place to work. They are hiring!
It will take Oracle 12 to 18 months to develop the kind of customer traction that will make other storage vendors set up and take notice. But Larry Ellison isn’t planning to lose and there is no reason he should.
Storage competition in the enterprise is about to get cranked up several notches. And that is a good thing for all customers.
Courteous comments welcome, of course.
One can hope. The Open Storage platform is technology quite convincing. It’s pretty clear to me that the engineers at Sun did a bang-up job with this platform. The one thing that Sun/Oracle could really use here is a plus up in its organic storage operations… essentially what they need most is movement towards Gartner’s upper right corner.
Joe Kraska
San Diego CA
USA
One wonders how Netapp will react. Oracle and netapp have had a very friendly relationship for years and have cross promoted each others products. Now that oracle will back ZFS ( another Netapp sore spot) financially hopefully this will start a price war that will benefit customers.
Crossing fingers!
Matt Martin
Denver CO
What Netapp will do with it’s lawsuit against Sun on ZFS…
Is Netapp next target for Oracle…
Might be heresy to say this, but now Netapp is the odd one out in the storage world. They are the only large storage player that cannot offer a complete solution to their customers. Logical for everyone, including Oracle/Sun to turn their sights on them, especially given their fat margins.
– EMC has a deep software stack and a close alliance with Cisco which rounds out the networking & compute side.
– Big Blue has it all
– HP’s got the whole stack. The IBRIX acquisition was one shrewd move. Takes them into the scale out digital world that neither EMC nor Netapp do particularly well in. Which is why you see smaller players like Isilon/Panasas/DDN, etc. play in that space
– Oracle now has a complete system stack as deep as Big Blue.
– Dell really a manufacturing & distribution shop. Not really sure they add any value from a technology perspective, but they can offer you compute/networking/storage and the PS to go with it.
Oracle has shown a long history of positioning themselves as the 500 lb gorilla. Want to run Oracle on VMs, you have to use our VM product or who knows what might happen? What to use Linux? Sure, you could try to use RedHat but hey, we got something too and who would you rather trust?
Now that they have a hardware arm, I can see Oracle giving away hardware to force people into the database. If you look at the margins on hardware, why wouldn’t you go after your competition this way? Also, I can see them forcing Oracle shops to their hardware by reducing support fees.
I don’t see Oracle caring about storage other than as a lever to sell more software and be independent of any other vendor. Now they are in an even better position to go after DB2 and crush the last enterprise database competitor they have.
I wonder what will happen to Pillar…..
Lou makes and excellent point. Oracle may well focus on being the best DBAS (database as a service) offering out there, and to do that, a consolidated DBMS, storage, shared filesystem and host configuration is the core. All things Oracle (Financials, PeopleSoft, etc) can be built on that. Will they spend money and energy on “ancillary” markets like general purpose SAN disk and NAS? No company, with the tsunami downturn coming straight at us (disclaimer: my opinion alone), can afford to flounder, no matter how deep their pockets are. And, I wonder about Pillar too?
Mauricio
An interesting marriage between Sun and Oracle but the Storage Server market needs hard disk drives that drive down power consumption for both Disks and Cooling Plan and offer a full set of ‘green ‘ credentials. The technology exists, has been tested and proved to work and can deliver without changing the methods by which we make Hard Disk Drives, now it needs to be adopted.
Here in the UK, we are already making waves in Government circles with this technology and Governments are keen to reward companies who can offer this kind of technology as a part of their pitch, with favoured status when bidding major contracts. What happens in the UK will happen in other European Governments and interestingly, the US has already gone out and said the same things, yet the Drive makers are less than luke warm, so who wants change?
There is an opportunity here too, the first major vendor to do a deal with us will get a real head start on that $20Bn requirement for the US Health Market, because we can offer what others cannot. Personally, I don’t want to deal with everyone, one good client with a contract for our technology and a clear lead will mean that we can deliver a unique propsition to the end customer, of course, if our licencee want’s to sub-licence their competitors to sell their drive subsystems, I am not going to complain about it, I’d be happy to encourage it since the licensee will be setting the prices, not me.
It should not need a genius to realise the global potential for this, since we intend to develop the technology into small format drives down the line, Storage Servers are a starting point for Disk Storage using our technology. In our solution there is no oil lubricant either, we can show a significant reduction in friction and almost zero wear in oil free test drives.
For more details, please reply with an Email address and brief details of what your organisation does, eg: customer, manufacturer/vendor of Storage Servers, etc.