* Sun develops pre-configured ILM bundles
On the whole, I prefer to deal with companies that let me in on the realities of their product pipelines. Alas, much of the time the vendors just blow smoke (or worse) in my direction, and I have to apply whatever filters I may have available. I just spent two days with senior management at Sun and I am sorry to say that they are no better at telling the world what they do than they ever were.
Corporate cultures seem to change slowly, if at all, and much around Sun is as it ever was – iconoclastic, antagonistic towards their neighbors in the northwest, and engineering-driven.
The corporate presentations were pretty much “mom and apple pie,” which is perfectly fine unless you are concerned about calories or Freudian issues. In the next years, expect Sun to focus on:
* The evolution of the 3000, 6000 and 8000 series, which will continue to be the core of the hardware products – expect Sun to spend a lot of time with the 6000 series, its home-grown line.
* Binding the company’s storage and resource management suites, which are now SMI-S compliant to ensure it interfaces with the rest of the world, to the company’s N1 initiative.
* Bringing online a set of remote monitoring services.
Ho-hum. No surprises.
As I said, Sun continues to be an engineering-driven company. This is usually bad news because it typically means that no one is paying much attention to what the field really wants and needs. Fortunately however, all engineers don’t work in the corporate R&D castle – some work in the field. When field engineers drive development it often turns out that being engineering-driven isn’t always such a bad thing.
For example, I went offline to speak with Chris Wood, who runs the pre-sales engineering support group and thus interacts daily with the real world. His group has put together a solution that sounds like a winner, even if it didn’t come up through development in the standard fashion.
The group has put together three pre-configured bundles that should be thought of as Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) appliances. IT managers concerned about regulatory compliance that requires an indelible audit trail should take note.
Each rack-mounted package contains Sun’s QFS and SAM-FS file systems, a redundant set of processors, a Fibre Channel switch, Fibre Channel and SATA arrays, and a tape drive. For the present, these appliances are aimed at the healthcare, geophysical and rich media vertical markets. They come in sizes of from 10-75 T-bytes, and are designed for easy integration with application packages for each focus area.
The appliances have been tested at large customer sites, and eventually will work their way into the Sun pricebook. It appears right now as if none of these packages can be ordered through your Sun rep, but that certainly doesn’t mean they can’t be bought. It just means that the field was way ahead of the corporate offices when it comes to rolling out these solutions. If you are interested but can’t wait until this works its way into the pricebook call your local Sun guy, or send me an e-mail and I’ll forward it to the right person there.
In the meantime, the appliances continue to develop. Next quarter look for 128-bit checksum capability, WORM drive management, and a capability that should be thought of as “assured delete,” which makes sure that when you say a file is gone, every copy of it is destroyed, including copies archived to tape and offline media.
A Sun competitor once told me that ILM isn’t a product but a process. Then, when that vendor did get an ILM-appropriate product, the description changed to “90% process and 10% product.”
The Sun concept seems to have upped the ante, and may shift the process-product ratio closer to 60:40.
Many engineers probably still shouldn’t be let out in public. Those who do get out however – and live to tell the tale – often come back with some pretty good ideas. This looks to be one of them.
