January 31, 2011 – We’ve seen some impressive financial reports from the storage sector over the last week or so, but Spectra Logic’s caught my eye. The company recently reported on the first half of its fiscal year, which ended December 31.
Bearing in mind that this a company that focuses primarily on tape libraries (although it also sells disk-based backup systems): Spectra Logic’s overall revenue grew 34% year-over-year, but the real shocker was that revenue from its enterprise tape library line (T-Finity and Spectra T950) grew a whopping 60% and unit shipments grew about 100%.
Revenue from Spectra Logic’s T50e and T120 tape libraries grew 54%, and the company’s total tape library and media revenues increased more than 50% year-over-year.
As I -- and many others -- have said many times before, reports of the death of tape have been greatly exaggerated.
Company officials cited increased demand for tape libraries in applications such as active archives and cloud computing as driving forces behind the revenue growth.
Spectra Logic also got a strong assist from its channel partners, where revenue increased 70% year over year.
Oracle-Sun-StorageTek
Meanwhile, at the high end of the tape market, Oracle announced the T10000C tape drive, which has a native capacity of 5TB and a native transfer rate of 240MBps. That’s more than 3X the capacity of LTO-5 tape drives, and 1.7X the transfer rate of LTO-5 (which is by a long shot the most popular tape format today).
The T10000C drives are available with native 4Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces or native FICON interfaces for connection to mainframes. The drives include inline encryption that does not degrade the 240Mbps performance, according to Tom Wultich, Oracle’s director of product management for storage.
Integrating the T10000C drive (which carries an Oracle-Sun-StorageTek brand) into Oracle’s high-end tape libraries (the SL8500 and SL3000) enables users to scale to a native capacity of 500PB. Assuming 2:1 compression, which is fairly standard in the tape arena, users can scale to an exabyte.
If archives keep expanding at a blistering pace, we’ll have to get used to that term ‘exabyte,’ which is one quintillion bytes (and conjures up fond memories of the company that used to go by that name).
Related blog post:
Who says tape is dead?
Showing posts with label Oracle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oracle. Show all posts
Monday, January 31, 2011
Friday, August 20, 2010
Who will Oracle acquire next?
August 20, 2010 – In my recent blog post on the Top 10 storage acquisitions of 2010, I solicited opinions from our readers on who they think will be acquired next. I’ll report on those crazy conjectures in a future post, but for now:
I heard from Stephen Jannise, an ERP market analyst with Distribution Software Advice. He recently blogged about what Oracle may be up to next (see “Oracle Mergers and Acquisitions: Who’s Next?”)
Stephen provides some very interesting analysis of potential acquisition candidates for Oracle, and has a survey on his post where you can vote. I encourage you to do it, if just for fun. Software Advice will have results from the survey within a few days, and I’ll update this post when I get the results.
Did you realize that since 2004, when it acquired PeopleSoft, Oracle has bought more than 40 companies, five of which were multi-billion dollar deals? Stephen includes a cool chart in his blog showing all of Oracle’s acquisitions and the relative sizes of the deals.
Most of Oracle’s previous acquisitions fall into the buckets of “applications,” “industry solutions,” “middleware” and “databases,” but two were in the “servers and storage” bucket: Sun and Virtual Iron.
However, in Stephen’s analysis and the reader comments on his blog, storage vendors are prominent as possible acquisitions for Oracle.
Based on analysis of Oracle’s M&A strategy and acquisition criteria, he puts the possible acquisitions into four categories:
Fairly Straightforward Ideas:
Teradata
Informatica
TIBCO
Messy, But Potentially Profitable:
CA
Sungard
Infor
Bold Moves into the Network Layer:
Research in Motion
Juniper Networks
F5 Networks
Brocade
Pricey Buys in Hot Markets:
VMware
EMC
Salesforce.com
Allscripts
Let Software Advice hear from the storage community: Check out the analysis and cast your vote at “Oracle Mergers and Acquisitions: Who’s Next?"
In the Comments section of The Software Advice Blog, the following storage or storage-centric vendors are mentioned as possible takeover candidates: Symantec, EMC, NetApp, LSI, Panasas
Dave’s comments (on only the storage vendors as potential acquisitions):
EMC, NetApp: Fuggedaboutit. These votes suggest that at least a few of Software Advice’s readers enjoy recreational drug use.
LSI: And that at least one reader has gone beyond recreational use. The question is not whether Oracle will buy LSI but, rather, whether Oracle will continue the LSI reseller deal that it inherited from Sun.
Panasas: Nope.
Brocade: Definitely a potential acquisition candidate, but not by Oracle.
In my opinion, the most likely (storage-oriented) candidates for Oracle would be CA and/or Symantec.
I heard from Stephen Jannise, an ERP market analyst with Distribution Software Advice. He recently blogged about what Oracle may be up to next (see “Oracle Mergers and Acquisitions: Who’s Next?”)
Stephen provides some very interesting analysis of potential acquisition candidates for Oracle, and has a survey on his post where you can vote. I encourage you to do it, if just for fun. Software Advice will have results from the survey within a few days, and I’ll update this post when I get the results.
Did you realize that since 2004, when it acquired PeopleSoft, Oracle has bought more than 40 companies, five of which were multi-billion dollar deals? Stephen includes a cool chart in his blog showing all of Oracle’s acquisitions and the relative sizes of the deals.
Most of Oracle’s previous acquisitions fall into the buckets of “applications,” “industry solutions,” “middleware” and “databases,” but two were in the “servers and storage” bucket: Sun and Virtual Iron.
However, in Stephen’s analysis and the reader comments on his blog, storage vendors are prominent as possible acquisitions for Oracle.
Based on analysis of Oracle’s M&A strategy and acquisition criteria, he puts the possible acquisitions into four categories:
Fairly Straightforward Ideas:
Teradata
Informatica
TIBCO
Messy, But Potentially Profitable:
CA
Sungard
Infor
Bold Moves into the Network Layer:
Research in Motion
Juniper Networks
F5 Networks
Brocade
Pricey Buys in Hot Markets:
VMware
EMC
Salesforce.com
Allscripts
Let Software Advice hear from the storage community: Check out the analysis and cast your vote at “Oracle Mergers and Acquisitions: Who’s Next?"
In the Comments section of The Software Advice Blog, the following storage or storage-centric vendors are mentioned as possible takeover candidates: Symantec, EMC, NetApp, LSI, Panasas
Dave’s comments (on only the storage vendors as potential acquisitions):
EMC, NetApp: Fuggedaboutit. These votes suggest that at least a few of Software Advice’s readers enjoy recreational drug use.
LSI: And that at least one reader has gone beyond recreational use. The question is not whether Oracle will buy LSI but, rather, whether Oracle will continue the LSI reseller deal that it inherited from Sun.
Panasas: Nope.
Brocade: Definitely a potential acquisition candidate, but not by Oracle.
In my opinion, the most likely (storage-oriented) candidates for Oracle would be CA and/or Symantec.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Who wins/loses in the Oracle-HDS breakup?
March 8, 2010 – In the fallout from the Oracle/Sun-HDS split, I imagine that the angriest bunch will be Sun shops that have been happy (yes, some Sun shops are happy) buying their high-end HDS storage arrays from Sun in bundled server/software/storage deals that translate into reasonable prices. Then again, there are plenty of other ways to buy HDS arrays: direct from Hitachi, from HP, and through HDS’ many channel partners.
If you missed the news last week, see senior editor Kevin Komiega’s story: “Oracle-Sun ends HDS partnership.”
Some observers suggested that the breakup was a deep blow to HDS, but I think Hitachi will get its share of the business with or without Oracle. (And bear in mind that the Sun-HDS reseller deal only involved HDS’ high-end USP arrays.)
And if not, the breakup could be good news for other high-end storage vendors, most likely EMC. In fact, EMC and Oracle are best buddies and maybe EMC had something to do with the Oracle/Sun-HDS breakup. (Then again, since when does Larry Ellison make decisions based on outside pressure?) It’s possible that Oracle will fill in the new gap at the high end of its storage lineup by inking an HDS-like reseller deal with EMC, where Oracle could leverage a much broader partnership than it had with HDS.
However, that goes against the prevailing opinion that the real driver behind the Oracle/Sun-HDS split was Ellison’s goal of becoming a soup-to-nuts IT hardware/software behemoth with total control over its stacks – and that means no hardware reseller deals.
If so, it’s not good news for LSI, which supplies Oracle/Sun with mid-range storage arrays. The survivability of that relationship has been under question since the Oracle-Sun deal was first announced.
And it will be interesting to see if this whole thing has any implications for Pillar Data (which is independent of Oracle but funded by Ellison).
The real winner in the fallout between HDS and Oracle, in my opinion, is the channel – and that includes both HDS resellers/integrators as well as VARs that carry competitive disk arrays and software. If HDS doesn’t grab the bulk of the business in Sun’s installed based via direct sales, that will be a plowable greenfield opportunity for the channel.
Some observers were surprised by the Oracle/Sun-HDS dissolution, and also noted that it was “sudden.” Far from it: This had been brewing for a long time. (In fact, I sort of predicted it back in April 2009; see “Oracle + Sun: Whither – or wither – the storage?” )
As for reseller opinion on the breakup, here are some comments from Greg Knierieman, vice president of Chi Corp., a Cleveland-based solutions provider that resells HDS (and other vendors’) hardware and software:
“First, I think it’s interesting that Oracle is not out in front of this with an announcement of their own in an effort to position themselves and to give guidance to their customers. Most of the enterprise Sun accounts are already working with HDS directly or with an HDS channel partner. In this respect, I think HDS and their channel partners are well positioned to maintain and grow with their Sun/Oracle customers.
“The other side of this is the Sun/Oracle relationship with LSI, which currently provides mid-range storage for them. Short of a specific announcement on LSI’s future from Sun/Oracle, there is now room for those very same HDS partners, like Chi Corp, to provide Sun customers with guidance and options for their mid-range storage.
“On who wins/loses: Oracle’s lack of a response has probably raised the concern of some enterprise customers. I doubt they are panicking, but they certainly have questions. While Sun’s business has been deteriorating for some time, there is still a solid base of dedicated Sun customers. Oracle also has a notorious reputation of charging an enormous amount for service, support and maintenance. Some of our customers who use Oracle software claim that their highest maintenance fees for any vendor is Oracle, so there is already skepticism about standardizing on Oracle hardware and what the long-term financial consequences will be.”
If you missed the news last week, see senior editor Kevin Komiega’s story: “Oracle-Sun ends HDS partnership.”
Some observers suggested that the breakup was a deep blow to HDS, but I think Hitachi will get its share of the business with or without Oracle. (And bear in mind that the Sun-HDS reseller deal only involved HDS’ high-end USP arrays.)
And if not, the breakup could be good news for other high-end storage vendors, most likely EMC. In fact, EMC and Oracle are best buddies and maybe EMC had something to do with the Oracle/Sun-HDS breakup. (Then again, since when does Larry Ellison make decisions based on outside pressure?) It’s possible that Oracle will fill in the new gap at the high end of its storage lineup by inking an HDS-like reseller deal with EMC, where Oracle could leverage a much broader partnership than it had with HDS.
However, that goes against the prevailing opinion that the real driver behind the Oracle/Sun-HDS split was Ellison’s goal of becoming a soup-to-nuts IT hardware/software behemoth with total control over its stacks – and that means no hardware reseller deals.
If so, it’s not good news for LSI, which supplies Oracle/Sun with mid-range storage arrays. The survivability of that relationship has been under question since the Oracle-Sun deal was first announced.
And it will be interesting to see if this whole thing has any implications for Pillar Data (which is independent of Oracle but funded by Ellison).
The real winner in the fallout between HDS and Oracle, in my opinion, is the channel – and that includes both HDS resellers/integrators as well as VARs that carry competitive disk arrays and software. If HDS doesn’t grab the bulk of the business in Sun’s installed based via direct sales, that will be a plowable greenfield opportunity for the channel.
Some observers were surprised by the Oracle/Sun-HDS dissolution, and also noted that it was “sudden.” Far from it: This had been brewing for a long time. (In fact, I sort of predicted it back in April 2009; see “Oracle + Sun: Whither – or wither – the storage?” )
As for reseller opinion on the breakup, here are some comments from Greg Knierieman, vice president of Chi Corp., a Cleveland-based solutions provider that resells HDS (and other vendors’) hardware and software:
“First, I think it’s interesting that Oracle is not out in front of this with an announcement of their own in an effort to position themselves and to give guidance to their customers. Most of the enterprise Sun accounts are already working with HDS directly or with an HDS channel partner. In this respect, I think HDS and their channel partners are well positioned to maintain and grow with their Sun/Oracle customers.
“The other side of this is the Sun/Oracle relationship with LSI, which currently provides mid-range storage for them. Short of a specific announcement on LSI’s future from Sun/Oracle, there is now room for those very same HDS partners, like Chi Corp, to provide Sun customers with guidance and options for their mid-range storage.
“On who wins/loses: Oracle’s lack of a response has probably raised the concern of some enterprise customers. I doubt they are panicking, but they certainly have questions. While Sun’s business has been deteriorating for some time, there is still a solid base of dedicated Sun customers. Oracle also has a notorious reputation of charging an enormous amount for service, support and maintenance. Some of our customers who use Oracle software claim that their highest maintenance fees for any vendor is Oracle, so there is already skepticism about standardizing on Oracle hardware and what the long-term financial consequences will be.”
Monday, April 27, 2009
Oracle+Sun: Whither -- or wither -- the storage?
April 27, 2009 -- The crown jewels in the Oracle-Sun acquisition are Java and, to a lesser degree, the Solaris/SPARC platform and, to a lesser degree, the MySQL database. But what about Sun’s storage lineup?
Here’s a clip from Ellison’s statements on the acquisition: “We will be able to tightly integrate the Oracle database to some of the unique high-end features of Solaris, engineering them to work together and for the first time to deliver complete, integrated computer systems – database to disk – optimized for” yada yada yada, but what disk system(s) will carry the load?
Although Sun has some interesting storage-related software technology (the ZFS file system and Open Storage code/initiative) that Oracle could capitalize on, what about the hardware?
For the most part, Sun is a storage reseller, OEMing its high-end arrays from Hitachi Data Systems and its mid-range gear from LSI’s Engenio division. But complicating the picture, Oracle has its own branded storage array via an OEM deal with HP. Not to mention Ellison’s pet project, Pillar Data Systems (which is funded by Ellison, but separate from Oracle).
And then there’s the Sun StorageTek tape business.
Some pundits have opined that Oracle will jettison all of the storage hardware elements. No way, because they’re already in the hardware business via Sun’s servers and why pass on some decent (although not as decent as software) margin business. However, the company definitely can’t go forward with all of the storage lines. There’s just too much clash.
Should I stay or should I go now?
I predict Oracle goes with two disk array lines. Factoring in Ellison’s ego, one would argue that Pillar stays. However, the HDS and LSI gear gives him a reasonable reason to pull the plug on Pillar and cut his (pocket change) losses. Then again, did I mention that he has an ego? It’s a tough call because Pillar definitely overlaps with Sun’s storage hardware.
Since Sun’s storage business is largely a reseller business, why not just continue to let HDS and LSI do all the work and throw some hardware bones to Oracle’s sales reps? Sure, Oracle sales reps don’t know how to sell hardware, but you wouldn’t have to retain all that many Sun sales reps to keep that business rolling. The downside to this is that it puts Oracle in direct competition with partners such as EMC, NetApp, etc.
Another option: Jettison the HDS, and perhaps LSI, relationship and extend the HP relationship and just concentrate on purpose-built, highly-optimized storage systems for Oracle databases. That option eliminates, or at least diminishes, the prospect of competing with partners such as EMC and NetApp in the more broad-based storage landscape. Then again, the HDS and LSI products are very solid and represent a lot of revenue if Oracle is willing to butt heads with partners such as EMC and NetApp.
And then there’s the Sun StorageTek tape business. Selling that off doesn’t seem to be an option. Who would/could buy it? IBM? Talk about monopoly. I never understood why Sun bought STK in the first place (access to mainframe accounts?), but it’ll be much harder for Oracle to figure out what to do with this business. Then again, it’s a profitable business with relatively low maintenance.
Yet another option would be to essentially spin-off Sun’s storage business.
What would you do with Sun’s storage hardware business if you were Larry Ellison?
Here’s a clip from Ellison’s statements on the acquisition: “We will be able to tightly integrate the Oracle database to some of the unique high-end features of Solaris, engineering them to work together and for the first time to deliver complete, integrated computer systems – database to disk – optimized for” yada yada yada, but what disk system(s) will carry the load?
Although Sun has some interesting storage-related software technology (the ZFS file system and Open Storage code/initiative) that Oracle could capitalize on, what about the hardware?
For the most part, Sun is a storage reseller, OEMing its high-end arrays from Hitachi Data Systems and its mid-range gear from LSI’s Engenio division. But complicating the picture, Oracle has its own branded storage array via an OEM deal with HP. Not to mention Ellison’s pet project, Pillar Data Systems (which is funded by Ellison, but separate from Oracle).
And then there’s the Sun StorageTek tape business.
Some pundits have opined that Oracle will jettison all of the storage hardware elements. No way, because they’re already in the hardware business via Sun’s servers and why pass on some decent (although not as decent as software) margin business. However, the company definitely can’t go forward with all of the storage lines. There’s just too much clash.
Should I stay or should I go now?
I predict Oracle goes with two disk array lines. Factoring in Ellison’s ego, one would argue that Pillar stays. However, the HDS and LSI gear gives him a reasonable reason to pull the plug on Pillar and cut his (pocket change) losses. Then again, did I mention that he has an ego? It’s a tough call because Pillar definitely overlaps with Sun’s storage hardware.
Since Sun’s storage business is largely a reseller business, why not just continue to let HDS and LSI do all the work and throw some hardware bones to Oracle’s sales reps? Sure, Oracle sales reps don’t know how to sell hardware, but you wouldn’t have to retain all that many Sun sales reps to keep that business rolling. The downside to this is that it puts Oracle in direct competition with partners such as EMC, NetApp, etc.
Another option: Jettison the HDS, and perhaps LSI, relationship and extend the HP relationship and just concentrate on purpose-built, highly-optimized storage systems for Oracle databases. That option eliminates, or at least diminishes, the prospect of competing with partners such as EMC and NetApp in the more broad-based storage landscape. Then again, the HDS and LSI products are very solid and represent a lot of revenue if Oracle is willing to butt heads with partners such as EMC and NetApp.
And then there’s the Sun StorageTek tape business. Selling that off doesn’t seem to be an option. Who would/could buy it? IBM? Talk about monopoly. I never understood why Sun bought STK in the first place (access to mainframe accounts?), but it’ll be much harder for Oracle to figure out what to do with this business. Then again, it’s a profitable business with relatively low maintenance.
Yet another option would be to essentially spin-off Sun’s storage business.
What would you do with Sun’s storage hardware business if you were Larry Ellison?
Friday, January 23, 2009
Application-centric storage challenges SANs
I’m in the process of editing an interesting, and perhaps controversial, article by Andrew Reichman, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. It’s based on his report, “Do You Really Need a SAN Anymore?” and makes the argument that application-centric storage may prove to be a viable alternative to traditional SAN architectures.
“Application-centric storage” is when application vendors embed storage functionality into their code to handle some, or many, of the functions typically handled by disk array vendors or third-party software vendors. As such, storage is managed from within the application itself.
I sincerely doubt that application-centric storage will challenge SANs, but in some cases it could make a lot of sense. And don’t underestimate the storage plans or capabilities of vendors such as VMware, Microsoft and Oracle.
Here are some examples, which I’m lifting from the article:
Oracle offers branded storage hardware under the Exadata label. Using its Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature to control the flow of data between application servers, and storage servers provided by technology partner HP, the Exadata system is a hybrid of software and industry standard hardware that Oracle will sell directly.
Microsoft recommends DAS for Exchange 2007. Exchange has long had a best practice for configuration that precluded adding other workloads to the storage array it runs on, which has served to put it on an island. Now, with the addition of Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR), the application can manage its own high availability and replication.
VMware offers native storage management capabilities. The virtualization market leader continues to add storage features to its application stack. For example, VMFS offers volume management capabilities within virtual machine management, and VMware recently announced vStorage, which includes native thin provisioning and other key storage features. While many of the storage features within VMware leverage SAN array capabilities, the control and management is substantially shifted to the application realm.
Leading application vendors probably won’t rock the SAN boat, but it’s quite possible that they’ll provide some worthy competition to the pure-play storage hardware/software vendors.
“Application-centric storage” is when application vendors embed storage functionality into their code to handle some, or many, of the functions typically handled by disk array vendors or third-party software vendors. As such, storage is managed from within the application itself.
I sincerely doubt that application-centric storage will challenge SANs, but in some cases it could make a lot of sense. And don’t underestimate the storage plans or capabilities of vendors such as VMware, Microsoft and Oracle.
Here are some examples, which I’m lifting from the article:
Oracle offers branded storage hardware under the Exadata label. Using its Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature to control the flow of data between application servers, and storage servers provided by technology partner HP, the Exadata system is a hybrid of software and industry standard hardware that Oracle will sell directly.
Microsoft recommends DAS for Exchange 2007. Exchange has long had a best practice for configuration that precluded adding other workloads to the storage array it runs on, which has served to put it on an island. Now, with the addition of Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR), the application can manage its own high availability and replication.
VMware offers native storage management capabilities. The virtualization market leader continues to add storage features to its application stack. For example, VMFS offers volume management capabilities within virtual machine management, and VMware recently announced vStorage, which includes native thin provisioning and other key storage features. While many of the storage features within VMware leverage SAN array capabilities, the control and management is substantially shifted to the application realm.
Leading application vendors probably won’t rock the SAN boat, but it’s quite possible that they’ll provide some worthy competition to the pure-play storage hardware/software vendors.
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