Bechtolsheim said Sun soon will ship flash storage systems.

"The most important thing about flash is it's getting cheaper all the time," he said. Flash, he stressed, "makes the storage go a lot faster."

Also at the conference on Thursday, Don McAskill, founder and CEO of the SmugMug online photo- and video-sharing service, weighed in on the merger. SmugMug uses MySQL, Linux, and Amazon cloud services.

"We're hoping that [Oracle] will realize that MySQL is not some sort of gateway drug to Oracle, that they're both great products," he said.