By KR Nambiar
Sun Microsystems is wooing channel partners to push its Open Storage platform to mid-market customers. The vendor has recently completed an education drive, and is urging channel partners to explore the huge opportunities in storage services.
Open Storage, the new unified storage architecture promoted by Sun, is based on industry-standard hardware and open source technologies. It offers an open storage architecture without vendor lock-in. At the core of the Open Storage platform are some of Sun’s well-known open source technologies and products such as Open Solaris and ZFS file systems, plus a number of third-party open source software products such as (popular backup software) Amanda. Sun unveiled the platform in November 2008, and in India commercially started shipping products by the end of 2008.
“Our Open Storage platform offers unprecedented savings in cost for customers especially as they scale up their storage infrastructure. The savings can be between 75 and 90 percent compared to solutions from proprietary vendors,” said L Sivasankaran, Director, Storage Practice, Sun Microsystems India.
The value proposition that Sun is offering is savings on the extra licensing costs that come with proprietary solutions. Also, since Sun’s solution is built on open source stacks, customers need not buy support from one specific vendor. “The customer can choose to upgrade or build solutions on top of Open Storage platforms without necessarily buying from us. There is no vendor lock-in, and they can take advantage of all the virtues of open source,” Sivasankaran explained.
Sun has already conducted around 10 workshops for its channel partners, and, according to Sivasankaran, the response has been positive. “Channel partners need to understand that the services around storage will become as big an opportunity as selling storage hardware itself. This is where a partner can benefit from the Open Storage platform because we allow you to build your own service stack and go to market with it. Since you have access to all the software and the code, the choices are tremendous,” he stated.
Sivasankaran added that Sun will be rolling out more specific programs to promote Open Storage solutions through partners. “In the days to come the data boom will be driven by non-enterprise customers, and that’s where we need our tier-2 channel partners to pursue this opportunity. We have already had a few good wins, and will be showcasing these in the days ahead to educate partners and customers.”
By 2011, Sun expects to grab around 12 percent marketshare globally for its Open Storage platform. |