Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Rich Napolitano, VP of Sun's Data Services Platform Group: Page 10 of 14

Napolitano: So we sit at the edge. Pirus's historical message was, we don't do Fibre Channel switching. If you want a Fibre Channel switch, go to McData Corp. [Nasdaq: MCDTA] or Brocade, or whoever. We have some number of ports, but it's not our intention to compete with those guys. That is still true. Now, having said that, if you think of us as the edge data services platform, then we want to run data services. So what you'll see is, certain applications we need to own because they're tied to the architecture, they're tied to the data path, they're mission-critical. They have to run at the speed of light. Then there are other data services, which are further away – we will open up our platform to allow some of that to happen.

Byte and Switch: But someone might look at that and say, "Sun is delivering this as a tightly integrated hardware platform, because then the cost of moving off that platform becomes higher." Right?

Napolitano: No, actually. If you look at the cost of the infrastructure, it's not around the switching. It's not around the stuff in the middle. It's around the back-end storage. So by opening up to heterogeneous storage – which is our religion – we give people those degrees of freedom.

Byte and Switch: When we talked with EMC Corp. [NYSE: EMC] CEO Joe Tucci recently, he said it's "insane" to think any substantial amount of storage intelligence will move into the network – there's some on the host, some in the network, and there will always be some in the storage array. Do you agree with that view? [See our interview with Joseph Tucci, President and CEO, EMC.]

Napolitano: He's right. I would agree with that. You know, we tend to be so black and white in this world. Especially in technology. At the end of the day, RAID today lives in the host, in the controller, and in the array. It lives in all three of those places today. And there are big businesses in all of those places...