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10.17.07
The End Of The Storage Business?
 By
Steve Duplessie
Where to begin? It's been a long 10 days or so, so this rant may be a tad longer than most. First, I ran off to Aruba with my lovely wife and two little ones for a week.
Great place, Aruba. One happy island. I had every intention of spending the week under a palm tree with my laptop getting a lot of work done, or actually writing the cancer book I've been promising for years. I did neither. I did spend a lot of time soaking up sun, cocktails, and pondering IT issues. Here's what I came up with:
The storage business as we know it, is over. I don't mean you won't continue to buy billions of dollars of storage products and services, but we're at one of those pendulum swinging crossroads as an autonomous business. Who got me thinking this way? Sun, of all companies. Only Sun could say something in such a wrong way, for the wrong reasons, to the wrong people, but end up being right without necessarily knowing why. Right before I left for 'de islands mon' Sun, in typical chaotic fashion, insisted on getting on my calendar for a huge, important, giant announcement they were going to make - "tomorrow, it has to be tomorrow - and no, it has to be Steve, and no, we can't tell you anything about what it might be related too....". Somehow, our client relations folks, with the patience of saints, were able to move things around so I could get on the phone for 30 minutes, from my car - which is a very loud convertible, to hear the latest revelation from the west. Their announcement, also known as Jonathan's blog, was to be around the fact that Sun is rolling its storage business back under its systems business. Whoopdie doo.
So forgetting the fact that it really wasn't worthy of an announcement at all, nor did anyone pick it up, nor did anyone even ask me about it (that is one company that is in serious need of re-inventing how it goes about messaging. They make HP marketing of the 90's seem downright brilliant sometimes), it did make me think about some things at the swim up bar.
20 years ago there was no storage business. It was a systems business that used storage as part of the overall platform to execute some applications. Companies competed on what their systems could offer for application functionality, typically embedded. The term "peripheral" was used to represent add-ons such as incremental storage capacity, but no one really bought storage independently from the system. Sun changed the "systems" business - namely it suddenly offered faster, cheaper, better new ways for engineers (mostly) to do their jobs than traditional business systems - minicomputers - offered. Unix became cool. Sun changed the game - they got the whole distributed computing thing moving. Right or wrong isn't relevant - it was entirely "blue ocean". They didn't focus on "my processor is better than yours, or my O.S. is better than theirs" - until later, and of course, that's when they went amiss. During the game changing era of Sun and distributed computing, people bought storage for Sun workstations from Sun for the most part - because that's how things were done. Peripherals.
So Sun completely changed the face of the commercial computing game - a well established gazillion dollar a year business with lots of very big companies in it. At the same time, other external factors were creating yet another game changing market opportunity - to change the way people thought (and bought) about storage. EMC got people to stop looking at storage as a peripheral check box when you bought your next mainframe or minicomputer (which is still one of the most remarkable feats ever in the history of infrastructure if you ask me). Two, NetApp looked at Sun's success, and figured out a way to segregate the decision on file server storage. They solved totally different problems (one for monolithic core computing, the other for the new wave of distributed networked computing), in totally different ways, on totally different coasts - and both have done fairly well financially because of it. You could argue that in the purest sense, EMC has dominated the block core world ever since, and Netapp the file serving world. Two halves to a market that didn't even exist at the time, which have yielded both companies outrageous fortune and spawned a huge industry. Blue oceans. Both did even though both were a piss-ant size wise compared to the incumbent systems guys they were stealing from, and both had to not only sell against those incumbents, but they had to teach the market an entirely new way to buy. That's hard stuff to do.
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