Why Sun Should Acquire a Solid State Disk Company ASAP

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Why Sun Should Acquire a Solid State Disk Company I published this article in May 2004. Since then it has been clear that the StorageTek acquisition did not give Sun the much needed kick up the derrière which it needed to become a storage technology leader instead of a me-too storage distributor. And in Q2 2007 - this was confirmed by Sun's lack-lustre storage revenue results.
	by Zsolt Kerekes editor of STORAGEsearch and the SPARC Product Directory
See also:-	the Fastest SSDs 2.5" SSD Guide / 3.5" SSD Guide What's an SSD? / SSD Market History Squeak! - How Solid is Hard Disk's Future? Squeak! - the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide Squeak! - the Top 10 Solid State Disk Companies article:- Despatches from the Magneto / Flash Wars Squeak! - Solid State Disks - Market Adoption Model Squeak! - SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" article:- 3.5" Terabyte Solid State Disks with Gigabyte / Sec Performance?
Editor's intro:-	Why Sun? And not IBM or HP? Well they will all do the same in the end. Any computer manufacturer could pick up the ball and do many of the things I've mentioned in my article below. But there is a unique set of reasons why I think that Sun will be first.

StorageSPIRE
1 terabyte solid state disk
from Solid Data Systems

Nibble: Operating System Support Can Work Wonders

Embedding native solid state disk support into Sun's Solaris servers would have far reaching effects:-

Sun's SPARC servers would reach a performance level which would take them 2 years ahead of the current SPARC CPU roadmap, and at much lower development cost.

Sun's AMD Solaris servers would run typically 2 to 3 times faster than competitors' Linux servers using the same CPUs.

...Later:- I was wrong about Sun being first to pick up the SSD torch. Sun didn't even see it.

In fact Microsoft became the first operating system vendor to incorporate SSD awareness in its Vista OS in 2006.

Although aimed at notebooks - the technology is capable of being adapted to Microsoft's server OS. When that happens - probably 2008 - Linux and Solaris X86 will look like lame ducks.

BiTMICRO Article Discusses SSD Vista

Editor:- October 20, 2006 - BiTMICRO Networks today published a new article discussing how perceptions about solid state disks may soon change - as a result of Microsoft's SSD support in Vista.

"In today's technological arena, SSDs are more commonly used as storage solution for defense, enterprise, and other market segments that are willing to pay premium. These industries are exposed to high-risk environmental conditions and have significant storage speed, reliability and endurance demands. The induction of hybrid drives via Vista is an opportunity for SSD to go beyond its widely accepted minor role and play a more prominent part in daily computing." ...read the article, ...BiTMICRO profile

Sun Ray compatible notebooks
from Accutech Ultrasystems

Later...

In November 2006 - Microsoft announced business availability of its new Vista operating system - the first PC market OS which included SSD-aware support and native SSD cache management.

...from SSD Market History

2.5" SiliconDrives
from SiliconSystems

The Need is Strong, the Upside Potential is Huge

Sun Microsystems' SPARC processors have been losing their performance advantages over Intel Architecture processors since 2001. Sun's recently lanched servers based on the new SPARC IV chips have left most analysts unimpressed.

Yes - it has two CPUs in each chip. So what?

Intel and AMD will be doing the same soon, and their clock rates are much higher. Sun's rapid operating system tweaks in Solaris mean that users can get a X2 speedup in many applications immediately, whereas rivals HP, Dell and IBM may have to wait another year for Microsoft to support similar features in upcoming Intel Architecture chips. So Sun has a short breathing space, in which it can live off stories of good TPC benchmarks. But the emperor has no clothes. Everyone knows Sun is not as good as designing fast chips which include tens of millions of transistors as Intel and AMD.

Sun doesn't have its own wafer fab, so it can't attract the best chip talent to integrate new ideas with manufacturable technology. The short term advantages of the "simple" RISC chips have long since been eroded as CPUs get fat with caches and multiprocessing support. But unlike Intel and AMD, who have to rely on 3rd parties to support new chips, Sun has a secret weapon, its Solaris OS. Computer architecture has moved on from the 1990s when buying the fastest clocked processor, and stuffing lots of them in a box guaranteed a faster server.

If Sun can deliver factory configured Solaris servers which include SPARC or Intel Architecture processors and run popular applications like Oracle 3 to 4 times faster than the biggest 4GHz servers from HP, then Sun's customers will take note. Such products could not only stem the flow of customers away from Sun to Linux, but actually reverse the tide. Sun's competitors will react, but their inability to tweak the OS as cleverly as Sun has always done with Solaris, means that Sun could get a 12 month window when its products are the sizzlers which everyone wants to own. Here's the trick. It doesn't need faster SPARC processors. Sun just needs to implement solid state disk support into Solaris, and ship boxes which include SSD as default options.

I believe that a $100 million strategic investment by Sun in SSD technology could return increased revenues of over $1 billion within the first year. Oh yes. And the new products will be more profitable too... Here are a few ideas to support this.

Solid state disks can speed up server performance by 2 to 4 times. There's plenty of evidence for this, see solid state disks case studies and articles for examples. But the SSD market is currently smaller than it should be because operating systems do not automatically recognise SSD devices and optimize them. Instead SSD vendors have been tweaking applications on a case by case, customer by customer basis. That's slow and too people intensive. It's like backing up your disk one file at a time from a keyboard without an automatic script.

Sun has a track record of buying storage companies to fix weaknesses in its own internally developed product families. Previous storage companies acquired by Sun include:- Cobalt Networks, HighGround Systems, LSC and Pirus Networks. While this is not in the same league as EMC, which has acquired 9 storage companies since Jan 2000, it shows a willingness to look outside for strategic solutions. A solid state disk company acquisition could cost a lot less money than most of Sun's earlier acquisitions. The upside potential is high. See also:- Acquired storage companies

Sun has a track record of advancing computer architecture. Computer architecture changed in 1992 when Multiprocessing moved out of the scientific supercomputer market and onto the desktop with Sun's SPARCstation 10. It was 5 years before the IA market caught up with that. Then Sun did the same trick again when it brought 64 bit processing to the masses in 1996. Today in 2004 faster clocked processors do not guarantee faster servers. The other parts of the computing network have not kept pace. SSDs are a 20 year old technology which have been used by the military to boost system performance. It's time for that technology to come in from the engineering lab and enter the mainstream. See also:- article:- Solid State Disks - a $10 Billion Market in 2007?

Who will Sun acquire?

I don't have any inside knowledge of that. There are plenty of solid state disk manufacturers to choose from, and I know that a lot more are making their plans to enter this market. We'll just have to wait and see. The market will be big enough for all.

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