Sun Shifts SAN to HDS

After months of speculation, Sun finally washed its hands of its 6920 midrange SAN system today, foisting the under-performing array onto Hitachi Data Systems.

Neither firm is disclosing the financial terms of the deal, which has been rumored for some time. Last year, industry sources claimed that Sun had talked to HDS and perhaps others about selling all or select parts of its storage business, though Sun played down these rumors. (See Sun Storage Chief: We're Not for Sale.)

HDS, which is currently fleshing out its own storage portfolio, will now be responsible for the 6920. (See HDS Hikes High-End NAS.) "What's happened is that we have signed an engineering support agreement with HDS for them to support the 6920 for five years," says Sun spokeswoman Michelle Parkinson.

The move is effectively the death-knell for the 6920, and Parkinson told Byte and Switch that an enhanced version of the product, the 6940, is now cancelled.

That said, it seems unlikely that HDS will now tie the 6920's technology into its own products. (See HDS PrepsTagmaStore, Ponders Sun.) Sun bills the 6920 as a virtualization system, and HDS has its own midrange SAN systems with virtualization. (See Hitachi Plans Midrange Rollout and HDS Strips Disk.)Sun's decision was not a shock to one technology analyst, who asked not to be named. "I think that they had to drop the 6920 -- they hadn't sold much of that product to begin with," he says.

The analyst told Byte and Switch that Sun's 6920 shipments had been in the "low hundreds" of units. Certainly, the vendor has had little success selling the device, which is based on technology it acquired from Pirus in 2002 for around $165 million. (See Pirus Gets Sun Tan and Sun Beams on Pirus.)

The 6920 was the only midrange SAN system in the Sun portfolio that the vendor developed itself. Sun's other midrange SAN offering, the 6540, includes controllers from LSI Logic, and the high-end 9900 is OEM'd from HDS.

Today's deal is a shrewd move by HDS, according to Tony Prigmore, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "HDS now has an opportunity to expand its 9900 presence," he says, adding that the 6920 will no longer be competing with it.

Sun, for its part, put a typically positive spin on today's partnership. "We decided to stop selling [the 6920] because of the success of the 9900 family and the 6540," says Parkinson. "It really created no space in the portfolio for the 6920."It remains to be seen whether more deals of this nature are likely, although ESG analyst Prigmore thinks that Sun is unlikely to sell off whole chunks of its storage business. "An awful lot of stars have to align to make that economically feasible," he says, adding that there is probably more talk in the marketplace about Sun's M&A plans than there is within the vendor's own offices.

Sun, which has struggled to swallow its $4.1 billion StorageTek acquisition, has spent the last year or so trying to make sense of its storage business. (See Sun to Acquire StorageTek for $4.1B, Sun Returns to Profitability, and Sun Reveals Roadmap.)

In Sun's most recent quarterly report, storage was something of a blot on the vendor's financials. Storage revenues were down 7 percent year-over-year to $626 million, thanks largely to integration issues connected to the StorageTek acquisition. (See Storage Slows Down Sun.)

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch