Sun storage: Your questions answered (most of them)

Last Tuesday, I met with senior management of the Sun storage group (now the Data Management Group). Several of you have pinged me trying to understand what to expect from Sun since the company’s buyout of StorageTek. Here are your questions, and here is some of what I learned.

What’s the new product line going to be called? Sun figures it has some brand equity in the Sun StorEdge marque, and a whole lot of value in the StorageTek name. So be on the lookout for machines labeled “Sun StorageTek.” Who cares?  The marketing guys do.

Which sales weasel is going to show up at my door?  That depends. If you are an enterprise IT site with mainframe technology, you are used to seeing the StorageTek rep (who most likely has served you pretty well) and will continue to see him. The big difference is that now he will have the Sun arrays (the 3000-, 6000- and 9000-series boxes) as well as tape products. Those of you who value one-stop shopping and already like StorageTek will like this.

If you are already a Sun storage site, expect at least one of the following to happen: a) If you don’t at present connect any Sun machines to your mainframes, the Sun reps will rely on the mainframe expertise of their StorageTek teammates to help them get some mainframe connections going; b) If you do connect Sun boxes to a mainframe (typically, this would be one of Sun’s 9000-series machines, directly attached), then expect the Sun sales reps to use the StorageTek services team to pry you away from the Hitachi Data Systems service people who have been supporting the 9000 machines (these are, of course, built by HDS). This may be a fine opportunity to work out a creative deal for your service pricing. Your leverage should be a reminder to Sun that when Sun provides the service, it has a good route to lots of add-on sales.

Also, if you are a storage admin at an enterprise site, expect your friend, the StorageTek rep to start to push for introductions to the guys who buy the servers – after all, these reps now have a lot of Solaris-based product to sell. My suggestions – first, hit the rep up for an extra coffee mug and a tee shirt before you do this. Remember, being a storage admin is not just a career, it’s a wardrobe. Then, after the introductions have been made and it’s time for the Sun guys to do a demo, hang around and watch – the system side of Sun really does have a number of creative guys doing good things, so you should see something worth watching.

If you haven’t seen Sun sales reps hawking storage at your site yet, don’t despair. Sun is in hiring mode when it comes to storage sales reps: Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Sun’s Network Storage Products Group, plans on bringing 100 more on board as soon as possible.

Finally, whither Sun in regards to network intelligence and security management? Something is definitely brewing at Sun regarding security, but we’ll have to wait until next month to find out what it is. As far as network oversight is concerned… well, it promised to get back to me on that one.