Module 5: Storage and Data Management Strategy

Sun provides a complete portfolio of platforms, software, infrastructure and services to meet customers' storage
and data management needs. Sun's storage solutions increase efficiency and utilization, and lower costs for the
customer. From the workgroup to the data center, Sun offers software and services, so customers can get the
most from their storage resources.

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Objectives
The objective covered in this module is:

z Describe Sun's storage and data management strategy

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Storage and Data Management Strategy
Sun has a complete portfolio of storage platforms, software, infrastructure, and services. These innovative
storage solutions help to simplify IT environments so that organizations of all sizes can increase efficiency and
utilization, lower costs, improve reliability, and compete more effectively. From the workgroup to the data center,
Sun delivers resilient, modular, and scalable solutions, software, and services that enable customers to get the
most out of their storage resources and meet their ever-changing data management requirements. Upon
completion of this lesson, you will be able to:

z Identify why storage solutions are important today

z Describe the impact of yearly growth on the data management environment
z Identify the strengths of Sun's storage solutions
z Identify sales opportunities to provide customers with end-to-end Sun infrastructures for their data
management needs

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Why Now? What Problems Are Customers Facing?
In today's global marketplace, companies are implementing new business systems, applications, and business
methodologies to gain a competitive edge. As a result, the data center is becoming increasingly complex, with a
proliferation of new servers and applications and a continuous rise in the number of heterogeneous, distributed
systems that are deployed.

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Increase Asset Productivity
Managing the exponential growth in the number of systems and the escalating amount of mission-critical
information being generated is creating new challenges for the IT organization. To be productive and profitable,
companies need continuous data protection without interruptions in service.

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Reduce Risk
IT managers must protect critical business data in the event of a failure or disaster. The IT organization must
also provide the highest possible levels of data access and availability. Data management solutions must address
issues on availability and complete recovery, taking into account such factors as cost, distance, and the ability to
operate across a range of heterogeneous systems.

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Control Costs
IT managers are also being asked to do more with less: to protect mission critical corporate data assets with
fewer staff members and smaller budgets. Reducing data management costs and licensing fees presents a
considerable challenge in tough economic times.

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Gaining Control
IT management needs solutions to stop storage and system sprawl and to regain control. These managers must
find a way to provision capacity from one central pool for all applications, enhance scalability to be able to meet
future capacity demands, and drive down cost and complexity. To succeed in the future, our customers must
have the ability to use data to their competitive advantage.

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Strategic Approach Needed
The challenges facing IT organizations today include selecting the appropriate media, increasing utilization,
decreasing complexity, and protecting data. The exponential growth of data means that organizations will
struggle with storing and mining data in a cost-effective way. Organizations must take a strategic approach to
managing the right data, in the right time, in the right format, and at the right cost.

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Explosion of Data
The most daunting task facing IT managers today is handling the explosion in the amount and variety of data
that must be stored and managed.

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Regulatory Compliance
To comply with recent government regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of
1996 (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley, and other rules from the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. (NASD)
and the United States (U.S.) Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), corporations must retain all records,
documents, and electronic communication, such as email and instant messages. Individual items must be
retrievable with ease so that they can be accessed in the event of an audit, investigation, or legal action. As a
result, IT managers are seeking the best way to archive this vast amount of information.

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More Data from More Devices
The global increase of networked devices compounds the data management problem. A recent study by the
International Data Corporation (IDC) projects an expansion to 17 billion networked devices, including computers,
appliances, and handheld devices, worldwide by the year 2012. But that is not all: add an astounding 1 trillion of
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags and sensors wirelessly transmitting data to servers, and what is the
result? An avalanche of data must be stored and managed.

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Not Just More Capacity
More networked things equates to more data. Worldwide, the amount of data generated by applications, devices,
and services is increasing at an average rate of 52 percent each year. This relentless growth represents a huge
challenge to an organization's IT infrastructure, but increasing capacity is no longer the only consideration. Being
able to store larger amounts of data in a short period of time presents ever-increasing demands on storage-
system performance.

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Taming the Data
The simple storage of data on disk is no longer a sufficient method of handling data. As the number of services in
the data center increases, the number of applications interacting with the data center storage resources also
increases. The applications need access to data by different methods and performance characteristics. The old,
application-oriented approach to storage system deployment is too difficult and costly to manage and does not
yield acceptable levels of storage-resource utilization and performance.

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All Data Is Not Created Equal
At the same time IT departments must store greater amounts of data, that data must also be handled
appropriately. Some data must be stored on high-performance storage systems. Some data must be protected
and secured, and some data may be mined to achieve competitive advantage. Because all data is not of equal
importance, organizations need the flexibility to store information in the right place, manage and secure the
information appropriately, extract that data efficiently, and analyze the data quickly and reliably.

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Competitive Advantage
Without a doubt, data management is now of strategic importance to the modern, information driven
organization. Having the right data at the right time generates optimal information, which in turn leads to better
business decisions. When organizations manage data better, they can make key, competitive moves faster.
Businesses must be able to store and mine their data to compete effectively.

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Sun's Offering Strategy
The ecosystem of servers, applications, networks, and storage form the infrastructure for competitive data
management. Individual components and platforms must be designed, integrated, and optimized together to give
companies an edge.

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System Approach
To Sun, the product offering strategy is all about getting the whole system right. The system is not just servers,
or storage, or operating systems, or middleware, and it is not just the network. Rather, the whole system
includes all of these pieces, and more importantly, how all the pieces interact to create, refine, transport, and
store data. Only when the whole system is optimized to work together can our customers achieve a competitive
advantage.

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Efficient Data Management
Sun has spent the several years trying to understand all of the specific storage pieces that are part of the overall
system. Through invention and acquisition, we have devised an advanced set of technologies that provide an
end-to-end infrastructure for efficient data management. In addition, our breakthrough business models enable
customers to reduce the cost and complexity of using and managing data, thereby staying competitive in the
market.

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Data Management System
Sun has talked about the right data-system architecture. Implementing that architecture requires a balanced
portfolio of storage products and enterprise-quality data management. Sun's portfolio enables customers to
define architecture for and implement data management solutions to meet their unique requirements.

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End-to-End Approach
Sun applies an end-to-end solutions approach when addressing customers' data management problems. Sun's
broad portfolio of hardware, software, and services positions Sun to offer a systems approach when addressing
these challenges. And our knowledge of the interdependencies between storage and the rest of IT infrastructure
qualifies Sun uniquely to offer best-of-breed solutions.

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Sun Solutions
Whether customers are trying to solve their business continuity requirements, comply with regulatory mandates,
consolidate existing storage and data center infrastructure, or apply data management principles to manage the
growth of data assets, who better than Sun to address these challenges? Sun offers a complete storage portfolio
to answer customers' storage needs, including the Sun StorEdge software, arrays of all sizes, data management
products, and tape backup systems.

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Sun Is Number One
Sun's extensive portfolio of storage platforms, software, infrastructure, and services excels over the competition's
offerings, and there are numbers prove it. IDC reported that Sun's storage revenues grew in the second quarter
of 2004 when all other competitors declined. In fact, Sun moved ahead of three competitors (EMC, IBM, and HP)
to take the number-one position in UNIX® platform-based storage revenue in that quarter.

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What Is in It for Sales?
Selling storage systems makes sense at every level and in every organization. For every IT dollar spent on
servers, organizations spend 55 cents on data management. Not capturing that revenue share in each account
means simply that you have to work twice as hard.

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Total Solution
Your sales emphasis should be on Sun's total solution. All system quotes should include storage systems, tape,
software, connectivity, and data services. Examine your customers' environment carefully. Are they deploying
new applications or making upgrades? Do they need additional capacity? Opportunities like these open the door
for you to increase revenue by providing data management solutions.

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Understanding Customer Needs
We know that relationship-based selling is everything in today's business. Your understanding of the customer's
needs commands the trust and rapport you have earned with your customers. Your ability to reach sales
objectives is a direct result of how well you truly understand what the customer would like to achieve and how
you map your product offering to that. Optimizing your share of the customer's IT budget is the objective for
your sales strategy.

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Competitor Focus
Sun Microsystems is the world's leading systems company, and our competition is trying to attack this position by
specializing in parts of whole systems only. Companies like EMC and Network Appliance focus on storage only. As
a result, they have created strong brand equity around that word: storage. Therefore, your sales strategy cannot
mention storage directly without first framing the discussion around data.

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Not Storage Only
Data management is too important to leave to a storage-only company. Sun offers the complete systems to
increase data management capabilities, from the data center to the data edge. You can offer your customers the
hardware, software, and services that they need to meet these ever changing data management requirements.

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Server Springboard
Sun is well known for the Solaris™ Operating System (Solaris OS), Java™ technology, workstations, and servers,
but it is less well known for its storage products. To turn this into an advantage, your best approach is to use the
server platform to pull the storage opportunity. Centering the sales discussion on the customer's data achieves
this by deflecting away from a storage-specific conversation.

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Mapping Products to Customer Needs
By asking questions about the desired performance level, data-protection level, and capacity needs, you can more
easily map Sun's products to the opportunity at hand. In the rest of this module, you learn more about how Sun's
portfolio of storage products can be applied to solve the complex data-management challenges facing our
customers.

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Summary
The amount of data companies must manage today is growing at a tremendous rate. As a result they need a
comprehensive storage and data management solution to help them efficiently access, process, and archive their
mission-critical data. Sun provides this total solution with a robust portfolio of platforms, software, infrastructure
and services that can help customers increase utilization and decrease cost.

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Apply Your Knowledge
You should now be able to:

z Describe Sun's storage and data management strategy

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