Will Honeycomb sweeten Sun's future?
Published: 28 Jan 2005 17:40 GMT
But the company has had a hard time selling that vision when it comes to storage. A year ago, Chief Executive Scott McNealy said the storage attach rate -- the storage revenue as a fraction of server revenue -- should be 90 percent to 100 percent. Yet from the last quarters of 2003 to 2004, that figure declined from 24 percent to 22 percent.
For some time Sun has tried to penetrate the storage market, but it's had problems, with products such as the A7000 failing. In response, the company inked a deal to resell Hitachi Data Systems' high-end storage systems, acquired Pirus Networks for midrange systems and began reselling Dot Hill lower-end systems. In addition, Sun licensed technology and bought engineering services from storage specialist Procom Technologies in 2004.
With storage hardware, "They're in better shape than they have been for a long time," said Data Mobility Group analyst John Webster.
And metadata tools could be a very useful addition, especially for customers interested in processing data that's retrieved in real time, Webster added. For example, a retailer might want to link a stream of data logged by radio frequency identification systems that track product sales with a stream of video that records customers' actions in stores. Those two linked data streams, indexed by metadata that records the time the information was gathered, could be used to find out customer traits retailers want to know.
Not first to market
Sun isn't alone with Honeycomb. Its chief competitor is storage specialist EMC, which not only beat Sun to market with a competing product, Centrea, but also acquired a company called Documentum whose software provides a necessary interface to make metadata useful.
EMC had more than 1,200 Centrea customers in 2004, has lured software companies to build Centrea support into 105 applications, and has sold a total of 30 petabytes of Centrea storage capacity so far. "It's clear from our results that Centrea has real momentum and is being embraced in the market. Customers are struggling with unstructured data and looking for help," spokesman Greg Eden said.
Sun believes it has an edge, though. Where EMC relies on a database housed on a separate server to store and process metadata, Honeycomb builds that function directly into the storage system, Davis said. Sun's approach is cheaper, simpler and doesn't require separate administrators, he said.
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