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Sun Microsystems received both bouquets and brickbats for its acquisition of StorageTek. However, Sun’s India country manager for data management, Vijay Pradhan, seems very optimistic about beating the market growth in data storage. He speaks with Sigi Achappa of CIOL, on the impact of the Sun-StorageTek merger.
Excerpts.
According to certain critics of the Sun- StorageTek merger, it was not exactly the best of deals. What is your take?
At the outset, the coming together of the Sun and StorageTek is concerned, StorageTek is strong in the area of data protection and compliance, now that the companies are together it strengthens the storage and archival piece, StorageTek has 36 per cent of all archives in the world, so its strength lies in data protection. Secondly, StorageTek has strengths in Mainframes. The product lines have been rationalized. When you consider all this it has been significant.
 On product additions and overlap –
The portfolio of Sun’s storage products looks at meeting the 5Cs – the customer’s need for storage capacity, continuity, consolidating, managing content access and implementing compliance requirements.
There has been an overlap for some of the products especially the tape libraries – as StorageTek was an OEM, but it was complementary in that sense.
The most important need was the ability to acquire quickly a group of storage professionals across the world. Sun wanted to address the growing trend. There have been no layoffs, Sun has added 7000 people globally after the acquisition.
On the competitive advantage that followed the merger –
Competitive advantage on three counts – the expertise, the resources and the ability to address a wide range of customers –mainframe customers to the mid-tier. The products portfolio addresses the need of all these customers. StorageTek owns IP in both disk and tape based storage.
On increasing reliance on disk based storage-
The cost of storage on tape is also reducing. So, backing up of data on tape is also getting cheaper. Backing up on tape is the last line of defense. In almost all large installations of mission critical information- customers have both the environments. Especially some telecom customers have as many as 6 to 8 tape libraries and one or two disk based back up products. So, both co-exist. It is not just a cost issue, both are sliding down . Even today, the cost-per-gigabyte is 1:10. so the gap remains all the time—it is nothing peculiar to tape or disk. And he market for tape will only grow. Therefore, what we are seeing is growth of large data centers. When the number of branches (of an organization) grow, the amount of data they have to store cannot be stored on disk. There is no substitute due to the significant lower costs of tape.
On the challenges faced by enterprises in data storage-
The main challenge is the management of the data as complexity increasing—using different vendors, different technologies. Protection – the ability to be able to virtualise, snap shotting adds more complexity. On one side the capacity is increasing, so complexity is also increasing.
On new products –
New products on the tape side for the mid-range market. Information Lifecycle Management, tiered storage and cost arbitrage, Fiber Channel, SATA is something which Sun espouses.
On Sun's market share-
We have grown 170 percent after the merger between 2004 –2005. There has been a significant growth this year 25 percent YOY. We will do better than the market.
Moving to the next level -
Content management, compliance – these will differentiate us from the competition and customers are looking for solutions in these areas. ID management for customers to access the data, virtualisation.
On growth areas -
It will be partly existing customers. With the strengthening of the mid-range products, that segment will contribute significantly. Since we are also a system player—storage tends to get sold with the servers, so you have the drag advantage.
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