To take his place as head of Sun Storage Sun has termed to long-term
StorageTek veteran Jon Benson, who is currently VP for tape
engineering. He becomes the senior VP Storage and now reports directly
to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwarz, as does David Yen. Many StorageTek people,
current and past, will think him a worthy and highly-regarded figure,
well-equipped to take on the role.
At the same time some storage engineers, who had worked on the
development of products such as Honeycomb and advanced network-attached
storage, with John Fowler's Systems group, are moving across to that
group and working directly in it.
Background
So David Yen returns to what we might characterise as his first
love. While at Storage he had helped get the product roadmap and
product engineering pointed in the right direction. Ironically, back in
the mid 1990s there was then a Sun Microelectronics business. Its
purpose was selling Sun's SPARC chips, motherboards and other
microelectronic products. This organisation lost its separate identity
when Sun found it impossible to maintain a SPARC OEM revenue-generating
business.
Now Sun believes there is enough attractive IP in its SPARC area, with
multiple threads and multiple cores, to make a SPARC OEM business
attractive once again. The Microelectronics group will oversee the
developments in network, cryptography and high-performance computing
and serve as a supplier to Sun's existing Systems businesses, in
addition to serving OEM customers across the globe.
Jonathan Schwarz said: "With numerous successes including the
success of our UltraSPARC T1 processors fueling the growth of our chip
multi-threaded servers, the tapeout of our Rock processors defining new
terrain in high-productivity computing, and innovations like Project
Neptune opening entirely new markets for our technology, now is the
time to fuel that same success with our Microelectronics products. As
with our software, decoupling our silicon from a strict reliance on
Sun's systems raises our profile and opportunity globally."
There have been rumours that David Yen was not happy with running
the storage business, that he might leave Sun altogether and take up a
teaching post. He spent just ten months in post, being appointed
in May, 2006. Although he has indeed left the storage business, it is
to head up, in effect, a start-up organisation within Sun.
In fact, two years on from the bringing together of Sun and
StorageTek, the company is now confident enough to put its storage
destiny in the hands of a StorageTek man through and through. Prior to
the coming together Jon Benson was a StorageTek VP and general manager
of automated tape solutions. His responsibilities then included the
highly successful StreamLine library product range. In fact he holds
several patents relating to these products. Both men, David Yen and Jon
Benson, seem extremely well-fitted for their new roles.
Moving the relatively few storage engineers who worked on Honeycomb
and, presumably, the X4500 to the systems group makes sense as these
products are not seen as pure storage. They are hybrid servers with
lots of storage and specialised software. Interestingly HP takes the
same tack. Its Neoview business intelligence product is also not in the main HP StorageWorks organisation.
Sun thinks that, by leveraging the expertise and processes used to
build servers alongside Solaris, Sun is positioned to build innovative,
compelling and competitive products for the storage markets.
Schwarz said: "Only Sun has the ability to span the mainframe
environment, with our legendary SL8500 libraries and crypto-ready
T10000 tape drives, all the way through to the emerging market for open
source NAS appliances, via the Solaris/ZFS-based Sun FireTM x4500. We
fully intend on leveraging those assets as we continue to raise our
profile and presence in the global market for storage products."
Read the original article: http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cfm?featureID=3260
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