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Sun's Canepa Goes Extreme: Page 2 of 3

Whether that's Canepa's fault is open to debate. It's analogous to a baseball manager getting fired when a team is losing; maybe the team just wasn't that good in the first place.

"Certainly a lot of fingers were pointed toward Mark, but storage at Sun has never been a strategic initiative," says Greg Schulz, an analyst with The StorageIO Group . "From a strategic standpoint it's always been a secondary effort at best, and I'd say that has more to do with the culture and the DNA at Sun."

In fact, Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) even put together a special Website just to pick apart Sun's storage history and the StorageTek deal. (Apparently, Hallmark didn't have a greeting card to suit the occasion.) The site notes that Sun talked about "redefining storage" in 1998, in 2000, and again in 2003. Cheeky.

StorageTek, meanwhile, finally turned in some strong numbers, boosting Sun's June quarter. (See Sun's Storage Rebounds.)

Canepa wasn't available for comment, and Extreme isn't yet commenting on the reasons for choosing him.