It sounds like Sun is looking at a long term Value Pricing strategy.

I was not in Denver this week, but many of the people I respect were. Chris Mellor often has some good insights, and here are some good nuggets from his report.

****”The promise is disk capacity at near raw disk prices, nt that Sun said that but why else produce this most commodity-like drive shelves unless you aim to undercut the EMC & Netapps of this world and their eye-watering prices for additional capacity. Buy a Sun storage product instead and add capacity via low-cost rack shelves like these.”****

****”Open Solaris gets a full NAS stack as CIFS is being added to it. That means people can build NAS products using it and compete with NetApp and EMC NAS – remember the JBODS? Open Solaris gets NDMP and failover too, both active:active and active:passive.”****

****”Of course the StorageTek customer base attending Forum got a loud, long and strong pro-Solaris message but that, being founded on Sun’s renewed and very public commitment to storage, went down okay. You get a feeling that a corner has been turned. Things are on the up and up and this product roadmap indicates that the future for Sun’s customers looks good.”****

From this report it looks like SUN is strategically going after the storage space with value priced equipment. My question remains whether Sun will be able to align their sales force with their customers’ desire for long term support and service over the their sales force’s tactical commissions for box pushing strategy. Are numbers shipped more important than long term customer relationships for service and support? It depends on your point of view.