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Rich Napolitano, VP of Sun's Data Services Platform Group: Page 9 of 14

NEXT: Owning the IP

Byte and Switch: Among the virtualization switch players, there are two camps. On one side, you have Rhapsody [acquired by Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD)] and MaXXan Systems Inc., which have "open" platforms that can supposedly run any software. Then on the other side you have companies like Pirus with fully integrated, purpose-built switches. Why is the Pirus approach better?

Napolitano: So, I love the "open platform" positioning, because what it says from the startups is that they couldn't figure out how to do the software – they could only figure out how to do the chips. That's really what it says. Frankly, many of the guys who came after us really tried to use that, but at the end of the day they don't have a whole solution. This is a system, and it needs to be designed together. And there are certain parts of it that you really need to own the IP [intellectual property]. Frankly, this is one of the reasons Sun acquired Pirus versus the 10 other guys they looked at. They decided, "We need to own the IP." That was a piece of it.

I think implicit in your question is something else... There's this notion that you have core switching – which is about fan-out and port cost – and then you have what we would call data services at the edge. Edge data services are more computationally intense functions, like a file system. And a file system is millions of lines of codes. At the end of the day the best place to run a file system is on a CPU... Those are not things you really want to port to ASICs.

Byte and Switch: So you sit at the edge.