The Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems has been approved by multiple stakeholders, such as the Sun stockholders and the U.S. Department of Justice, and the merger appears likely to happen soon. Customers, competitors, industry and Wall Street analysts, as well as individual technology enthusiasts have all started speculating about the post-merger offerings from Sun-Oracle. The future storage lineup from the combined entity stands out as one of the most uncertain areas.
One key factor in this case concerns the destiny of Pillar Data Systems, which is a network storage vendor funded by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Many IT professionals are expecting the convergence of Pillar and Sun storage, and industry rumors suggest the same. However, while the Sun-Oracle acquisition and post-merger restructuring will be subject to corporate governance, the destiny of Pillar will essentially be Mr. Ellison’s personal decision. And, since Pillar is an independent entity, the adoption of Pillar into the Sun-Oracle storage offering portfolio will not be free. The Sun-Oracle corporation would need to offer Mr. Ellison an attractive price to acquire Pillar.
From Mr. Ellison’s standpoint, it would be difficult to balance the competition between Sun Storage and Pillar. With Oracle alone, there is no conflict of interest for Mr. Ellison since Oracle is not a storage vendor. But with Sun-Oracle, Mr. Ellison will be juggling competing storage hardware offerings from both the public company that he leads and his private company – unless he sells Pillar to Sun.
Does Sun need Pillar for the Sun Storage portfolio? Probably not.
Sun already has an extensive storage offering portfolio, including the 2500 and 6000 series entry and midrange arrays OEMed from LSI; the 7000 series IP-storage and Sun Fire Storage Servers based on Solaris ZFS; and the 9000 series enterprise platform OEMed from HDS. The Pillar Axiom storage platform does not appear to be a reasonable replacement for any of above.
The Sun Storage 2500 and 6000 series are built with industry-standard hardware from LSI. These systems are also resold by many other storage vendors and integrators as best-of-breed commodity storage platforms. The Pillar Axiom platform is based on a proprietary design and sold at premium prices compared to the LSI-based storage products. If the Pillar Axiom replaces the Sun 6000 series midrange offerings, it is likely that Sun-Oracle would be unable to compete on prices, which is crucial for the midrange market, especially during an economy downturn.
The Sun 7000 series and the Sun Fire Storage Servers are built with industry-standard server hardware running Solaris ZFS. These products represent commercial-grade solutions and are based on the Solaris ZFS technology (which is also available in OpenSolaris and can be used to build open storage solutions). The Sun 7000 series and Sun Fire Storage Servers are even more affordable than the Sun 6000 series. The affordability of these ZFS-based storage solutions has been highlighted as one of the key advantages of the Solaris operating environment. The Pillar Axiom is not likely to replace the Sun 7000, due to the significance of the 7000 products as part of the Solaris proposition.
The Sun 9000 series storage arrays are rebranded from the HDS USP V platform. The HDS USP V platform is also being resold by HP as the XP arrays. The main reason why Sun and HP resell the HDS USP V platform is mainframe support. Although Pillar considers the Axiom array an enterprise platform competing with other high-end arrays such as the HDS USP V, Axiom lacks support for mainframes. Hence, Sun-Oracle would not likely discontinue the 9000 series and replace its enterprise storage offering with Axiom.
Hence, in conclusion, Mr. Ellison will surely be facing conflicting interests between Pillar and Sun storage offerings. The convergence of Pillar and the existing Sun storage portfolio will not be an easy task. Given the fact that Sun’s 2500, 6000, and 9000 series are all rebranded products, and that Pillar Axiom is not a direct replacement for any of them, the only reasonable scenario would be converging the Pillar technology into Solaris. But, we question whether Mr. Ellison is likely to donate the Axiom controller code to the OpenSolaris community. Is it possible that the Sun-Oracle corporation will come up with a handsome budget to purchase the intellectual property from Pillar and utilize it for future Solaris-based storage solutions so as to avoid the conflicting interests of Mr. Ellision?
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