Is Sun open source storage play too late?

Sun has laid the hammer down in enterprise storage, with an “open source” offering that really does pass the savings on to the customer, as they must be passed.

Enterprise storage costs more than what you have in your home. My son is a gamer who has 850 Gigabytes of storage. The low end of the new Sun line is 2 terabytes for about $11,000. I’m certain the Sun price is worth it.

As Larry Dignan notes, Sun hopes open source developers will rally round the flag, boosting storage sales from $25 million to a hefty share of its $3 billion total revenue base.

But as ZDNet also noted yesterday, it may be too late. Sun had to take enormous writedowns in the last quarter, posting an eye-popping $1.67 billion loss.

What really makes a downturn like the present one brutal is its ruthlessness. If companies fear doing business with banks that are on the brink (despite insured deposits) how you think they like dealing with vendors suffering the same perception?

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