Sun Sees Cheaper Storage Ahead

A Sun Microsystems executive vice president has predicted that open platforms will do for storage what they did for servers and PCs: make them cheaper and able to be distributed throughout a business.John Fowler, executive vice president of systems, told CNET News that "the storage marketplace is almost identical to the server market of 10 years ago. High-end storage arrays have proprietary hardware, proprietary silicon, and often proprietary silicon sold at very high margins." But, he said, the increasing use of multicore processors and open-source software is about to change all that. Prices will drop to the point where storage units can be deployed on a departmental basis rather than housed in a centralized computing room. "It will be like the PC revolution," Fowler said.

He also predicted that vendors would add new features, such as Sun's proposed system that incorporates a cache of flash memory. It would combine the capacity of a multi-drive storage unit with the access speed of a hybrid hard drive.CNET News