back to article Sun and NetApp gain market share

Sun showed everyone a clean pair of heels as it grew its external disk storage market share faster than any other vendor in the second quarter of the year according to Gartner. IDC's quarterly disk disk market tracker also shows Sun way out in front. The Gartner report tracks world-wide external controller-based disk storage …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Dell(?) Storage

    Given that all of Dell's external fibre channel storage is actually rebadged EMC kit, it would be interesting to see a breakdown of fibre channel over iSCSI and NAS external storage for Dell. This can then be added to EMC's growth. The Dell iSCSI storage can then be associated to EqualLogic.

    Minds the one with the Dell stencil in the pocket...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    not so sure...

    ...that JS will be smiling - he might have seen a nice revenue growth, but his market share is sliding from 7.1% to a measly 6.1%

    Of course its much easier to see big % gains when your a bit-part player in the first place.

    A bit more health cynicism for these sorts of numbers from you journos is appropriate (oh sorry I forgot - this is Sun we're talking about, for some reason el reg thinks they walk on water)

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Sun is dying on the vine

    Sun is still pushing unit sales vs. what customers really want is better systems that deliver more business value. No wonder they cannot be profitable. Their "Value" line is a.k.a. cheep stuff.

    The big news is if Siemens splits from Fujitsu what will that mean for Sun sales in the future? They do not have a resell agreement for any future systems of the M-Class(Fujitsu) they are trying to push into their install base.

    Is this the death of SPARC, is Sun moving their customers to SPARC64 only to have them move to Fujitsu in the future. Will Sun's European business be in accelerated slide as Siemens moves to Xeon?

    What ever the answers are...its even more bad news for the $2 Coffee company.

    B. Siddons

  4. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    300% of virtually nothing is still nothing!

    As they always say, there are lies, damned lies, and anything a salesperson puts on a slide! Not too many years ago, when Sun had finally stumbled into the blade server market the first time round, they sent round a bubbly salesgruntette who tried to tell us how lovely the Sun was shining in the land of blades now they had their offering, and how they had a staggering "300% growth in a single month in the UK market, the best performance of any blade vendor in the UK!" This was complete with a graph with Sun having a massive block labelled 300% whilst IBM and HP had tiny little blocks marked something like 5% each or so. Very impressive!

    A quick enquiry into exactly what that meant was at first avoided, then grudgingly admitted to be "six chassis sales last month after two in the preceding month...." During the "staggerring month" we alone had placed an order for sixteen HP blade chassis for one project!

    I'd be interested to see an actual breakdown of the units shipped and factory revenue in $, but I expect that wouldn't be quite as flattering for Sun. But at least it's upwards - unusual for a Sun product these days!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pangaea Ultima - Earlier Than Expected

    Geographically Japan grew most at 38.7 per cent , followed by Latin America (25.2 per cent), EMEA (22.3 per cent). Asia Pacific (16.6 per cent) and, trailing, North America at 12.7 percent.

    Well on our way to a new super continent.

  6. Joshua Goodall

    Thumper?

    The X4500 Thumper should not be included in storage sales figures. It's unclear from the article whether this was the case.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Pony expre$$

    Nice one sun!

    Maybe ZFS has helped their storage sales...

    http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

  8. David Halko
    Go

    to B. Siddons -- SUN is apparently not dying on the vine...

    article -- But while the market grew 18.8 per cent compared to Q2 cy'07 only Sun (34.7 per cent) and NetApp (22.9 per cent) outgrew the market and gained share. The other six vendors all gave up share growing as follows:- Dell 18.3 percent - HDS 18.1 per cent - EMC 16 per cent - IBM 14.8 per cent - HP 3.4 per cent - FSC -2.8 per cent

    If SUN is dying at the vine, they seem to have more sales than any other storage vendor! You can't gain in Market Share, out-grow the Market, and STILL be dying at the vine!

    article -- Gartner reckon that Sun made stellar sales of its StorageTek 2000, 6000 and 9000 series products. Sun has also said that its Sun Fire x4500 'Thumper' hybrid storage/server grew billings 37 per cent year-over-year in that quarter. It retained its top ranking for Unix units shipped for the 19th successive quarter.

    Once again, if SUN is shipping more UNIX boxes than any other vendor, they are not dying at the vine.

    SUN is also increasing their Linux and Windows share - it is just a matter of time before they stabilize.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    @Matt Bryant, U Got the Wrong Article, Dude! LOL!

    The article is not talking about blade servers, but about storage systems.

    "Sun (34.7 per cent) and NetApp (22.9 per cent) outgrew the market and gained share."

    34.7% of the storage market is nothing to sneeze at, when EMC has 16% and storage is their only serious product offering.

    Not sure why you have an axe to grind...

  10. Victor

    Thumper

    Thumper is mostly storage, almost nothing server... why shouldn't it be included?... it's a solution in a box

  11. zvonr

    Sun has great storage technology.

    I am a ZFS user, and I can't imagine using another file system again... snapshots, clones, compression, raid,... ZFS has the architecture to better take advantage of SSDs than any filesystem out there... Solaris has other nice features like zones and dtrace ...

    For everybody HP, IBM fanboy out there who so passionately talk crap about sun, go ahead and try out zfs with solaris, it will run fine on IBM and HP storage..., support will cost you as much as linux, and you will get a more advanced OS ...

    Sun has amazing technology in the storage area: ZFS + Lustre, and it's open source ...

    The Mac fanboy crowd will have ZFS soon...

  12. Michael Bukva
    Boffin

    x4500 'thumper' *is* storage. It's also a server...

    Joshua,

    The x4500 'Thumper' definitely breaks some category barriers. Its a server, its "a storage", it's a NAS appliance (with OpenSolaris even more generally so). 48x 1TB in 4RU is more storage than you can buy at IKEA :) The TB/RU ratio alone makes it "a storage". The new x4540 with J-series JBODs as expansion modules only strengthens the case.

    It is fair for Sun to count x4500 sales in BOTH server AND storage categories.

    It really is both. Is light a wave or a particle ?

  13. Morten Bjoernsvik
    Thumb Up

    @Josua Goodall

    Do you know what the X4500 is:

    It is a operon based server with a 48disk-array and some cheap merlin sata 8x controllers. You only buys this for the disk-array nothing else.

    Compare this to all the other vendors that have to provide a hardware raid backend to be able to offer the same level of service. A commodity 4 socket opteron server is cheaper than hardware raid controllers with specialized memory.

    ZFS bridges simple commodity hardware with raid and disk management features.

    X4500 is the cheapest and most flexible storage-solution in the NAS <=48TByte segment.

  14. Rob Isrob
    Thumb Down

    Bit weak

    Gee whiz... what's with you guys? You get to the Rog and fall in line to talk up Sun?

    Is one of the sign-ons to be a sun fanboy?

    Anyhow...

    "The collection of all other vendors grew their total revenue at 38.5 percent, more than twice the market rate. We might possibly assume from that surprisingly high growth rate that vendors such as 3Par, Compellent, Data Domain, and Pillar are making good progress at the expense of all other vendors except Sun and NetApp."

    Why not just go and see what fellow writers say? Chuck for instance?

    http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/09/the-information.html

    The big market share gainer according to Gartner?

    That would be "other" category at 2.3%, meaning more and more of the pie is going to the newer entrants -- collectively, that is. To me, this means that the market still has plenty of room for innovation from smaller vendors.

    So there you have it. Those fast growers are now 2.3% of market share. Big whoop.

    They certainly aren't eating into the others.

    Sun? Irrelevant. Please lay off the Sun koolaid. Their stock tells you all you need to know about how far they've fallen.

  15. Lou
    Alien

    Lol at the Sun Haters

    Sun has 34% marketshare - B. Siddons try and read the article carefully again.

    Sun has 35% market share - Mark Bryant - all vendors twist stats to fit their purpose - I had similar lines from other vendors - sometimes you should take of your antiSun glasses and give credit where it is due - at last (contrary to my expectations) the StorakeTek buy-out is paying some dividends.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    But what about ongoing support?

    Sun sales may have increased, but with a massive reduction in force (RIF) program will you get support and or service? Selling is now done on price and as the salesforce have had their commission claims rejected (for spurious reasons) you will soon be buying these products on line or from a rep rather than someone who understands your business.

    Buy cheap - Pay twice.

  17. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    RE: Anonymous Coward, zvonr and Joshua Goodall

    RE: AC - I was only giving an example of how % market growth can be used in a deceiving manner. I'm sure a comparison of actual marketshare of storage products sold in the period would still show EMC, HP and IBM (and probably Dell too) supplying more actual units and making more factory revenue than Sun, though it is good news for Sun that it did manage to grow its share in one market at least.

    RE: zvonr - I have evaluated Slowaris x86 and ZFS, and I still have no intention of ditching any Red Hat systems for Slowairs x86, for the simple reasons the Red Hat has far superior application support, a record of excellent performance and technical support which has engendered trust, and previous poor experiences with Sun. If it floats your boat then fine, enjoy, but don't assume that makes it the best solution for everyone.

    RE: Joshua Goodall - why shouldn't Thumper be included, it seems to be aimed at the NAS market? Of course, I'm sure none of the market figures include the thousands of much cheaper and more popular ProLiants or xSeries bought as straight servers and then used with Linux as NAS systems....

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @ David Halko

    David, your three statements...

    1. You can't gain in Market Share, out-grow the Market, and STILL be dying at the vine!

    2. Once again, if SUN is shipping more UNIX boxes than any other vendor, they are not dying at the vine.

    3. SUN is also increasing their Linux and Windows share - it is just a matter of time before they stabilize.

    1 and 2 .

    Yes you can - if you're selling at a loss! Are they expecting to make it up on volume? I'm not saying that Sun is, but it's certainly possible.

    3. Who says they are increasing Linux/Windows market share? The two authorities in the industry - IDC and Gartner - don't.

  19. zvonr

    Response to Mr. Matt

    Mr. Matt Bryant I don't assume anything, I am only presenting my opinion, just like you do, however without making disparaging remarks.

    Calling Solaris Slowaris is not an argument and will not enforce whatever you say.

    And I disagree with you that Solaris is slow and I will give a simple scenario: after a power outage ext3 will require a fsck while ZFS does not, and as a result Solaris will come up a lot FASTER, increasing system availability.

    I have developed and deployed software on OS/2, AIX ,Windows, HPUX, Solaris, Linux, and all I can say that every OS has/had its merits. I also find the X86 architecture very hard to love from a technical point of view, but it does show how important backward compatibility and volume is.

    If you buy the hardware and the OS from the same vendor you will always get better support, right now you can add MySQL to the stack. If I have to run Oracle on Linux I will always go with the "unbreakable" Linux from Oracle to avoid Redhat Oracle finger pointing.... I always had a good experience with Sun support, I never had a problem they have not been able to fix ...

    Obviously Sun disappointed you, just like HP disappointed me when I needed to pay a 1000$ license fee to have software mirroring on my PARISK workstation a while ago... however I don't go around and post disparaging comments about HP...

  20. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    RE: zvonr

    "....And I disagree with you that Solaris is slow and I will give a simple scenario: after a power outage ext3 will require a fsck while ZFS does not, and as a result Solaris will come up a lot FASTER, increasing system availability...." Sorry, I work with highly available systems, where we design it such factors as redundant power, UPSs, etc, distance clustering to a remote site, areas where HP-UX and the HP product range shine. If your business stops because of a power outage then I assume it's pretty low-level stuff.

    "....to avoid Redhat Oracle finger pointing.... I always had a good experience with Sun support, I never had a problem they have not been able to fix...." Well, did you have the one where your built-in Broadcom ethernet adapters didn't work, and Sun took two weeks to confirm what you were telling them, then they tried to blackmail you into signing a confidentiality contract BEFORE they would give you the fix? Believe me, you have never seen Sun kit ejected from a building as fast as when the CEO found out! As for finger-pointing, I have sat in meetings where Oracle staff have finger-pointed at each other. The answer is to always go to such meetings armed with enough evidence to be able to say "no, the problem is here and you need to fix it".

    "....HP disappointed me when I needed to pay a 1000$ license fee to have software mirroring on my PARISK workstation a while ago...." MirrorDisk on a PA-RISC workstation? Couldn't you afford a server for the job? Yes, HP charges for their proprietary mirroring software, just like Veritas does for Volume Manager. Maybe now wouldn't be a good time to tell you that the free rsync software works on hp-ux just fine? In fact, there's no need to even go and download it as it's bundled on the Internet Express CD set in the OS media pack. I'm assuming you had a real need for the bullet-proof mirroring given by MirrorDisk and rsync couldn't do the job (did you need the three-way mirroring feature?), so I suppose the $1000 was well spent.

    Can we have a pointing-and-laughing icon, please?

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