Storage Up Yearly 4.6% at Sun

Following the acquisition of StorageTek by Sun Microsystems for $4.1 billion in 2005, you hear often storage professionals telling you that the result of this operation is catastrophic. It is not, even if it not a great success looking at the last financial results of Sun.

Fir its second fiscal quarter ending in December 30, 2007, storage products revenue was $655 million, a yearly increase of 4.6%, representing 10.3% of total sales. The last known figure of the revenues of StorageTek is $666 million, including services, for its quarter ending in December 2004.

Sun also stated:“ Our infrastructure software business grew more than 12% year-over-year, along with our enterprise servers, inclusive of mid-range and high-end platforms which grew 6% year-over-year, as the OPL based SPARC Enterprise M series continues its strong performance in the data center and our long-standing relationship with Fujitsu continues to bear fruit. disk spaced storage grew 7% based on strong high-end and mid-range array performance, and Sun Fire 4500 or Thumper billings were approximately 26 million in Q2.”

During the earning call of the company on January 24, an analyst asked the following question: “Can you give us an update on how you are looking at your storage strategy going forward? Obviously you have seen some improvement there this quarter; in particular, how do you look at the strategy of OEM technology versus your own internal technology, and are you open to new OEM partnerships as you try to kick-start the business while you ramp the homegrown technology?”
President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz answers: “I think we are very happy with the performance of the storage business this quarter and that is both the performance of the OEM businesses as well as more homegrown technologies. I think broadly speaking, we are interested in capturing customers and being able to deliver to them a compelling roadmap that engages in a life-cycle of business with Sun that yield that greatest value to both of us over a long period of time. I think we certainly looked at and look at VFS and the core open source file system that I think has been generally recognized as a pretty disruptive innovation in the storage marketplace, giving us an opportunity to have a fundamentally different discussion with customers, which is the same open source revolution that created opportunity for Linux and for the evolution of a very different server architecture and is now available to storage customers who might want to pay a lot less but get a lot more performance and a lot more flexibility. We are interested in building out our product line; we are going to be careful about how we go do it and we are always interested in building new OEM relationships, where there is value for both parties.”