So when asked to reconcile McNealy's view with the StorageTek business Sun acquired last year, company executives chuckled politely and said the company is spending millions of dollars acquiring mainframes for storage-related development. But more importantly, 'it's not the hardware that's important, it's the way we tie into those applications,' said Jon Benson, vice president of development in Sun's StorageTek.
Prior to the acquisition, about 40 percent of StorageTek customers used mainframes.
Indeed, Sun's project Honeycomb, which the company demonstrated, includes an embedded search technology that will allow application writers to offload the search capabilities to the storage system. Sun said the technology will speed access to data and improve the ability to use it.
One user at Tuesday's event, Justin Shaffer, vice president and chief architect for Major League Baseball Advance Media L.P., said he's interested in the Honeycomb system because it moves the storage closer to the data. 'The more efficient we can make processes internally for accessing media and then redistributing it, the better off we are,' he said.
Sun announced a number of storage-related products -- including a new release of its virtualization and data management tool, the Sun StorageTek VSM system 5 -- which is designed for mainframe environments and doubles capacity and performance from its previous generation, the company said.
Sun officials said the company isn't about to upset StorageTek customers -- some of whom may still be wary about the outcome of the acquisition. Among those customers is Erv Kuhnke, a consultant with B2C Inc. an Alexandria, Va.-based government IT consulting firm. He attended the event, in part, to learn more about Sun's StorageTek integration.
'I'm a little concerned about it,' Kuhnke said about Sun's integration plans. StorageTek, he noted, 'has always had excellent service.'
The idea of layoffs or other cutbacks at Sun continued to hang in the air. New CEO Jonathan Schwartz, appointed to the post last week, said at the time that some 'pruning' is possible.
Scott McNealy, who gave up his CEO role but still serves as board chairman, said that Sun has opportunities 'to get costs synergies' with its integration of StorageTek, including combining 160 redundant field sales and support offices. 'That will actually have a positive effect' by allowing Sun to price more aggressively and improve product integration.
'I'm not sure that necessarily taking ' as Jonathan called it taking a pruning effort to expenses ' necessarily means a reduction in the actual headcount,' said McNealy.
Clifford Russell, systems analyst at the University of Maryland's Electrical and Computing Engineering Department, was on hand to learn more about Sun's Sun Ray thin client. His department has 25 thin clients in a laboratory, but there's interest in using them for staff as well, increasing the total number to around 200 clients.
The goal 'is to get as many moving parts off the desks as possible,' said Russell, who believes replacing PCs with centrally managed thin clients will reduce support costs.
Despite his interest in thin clients, Russell has concerns about Sun, particularly the company's service and support. 'We felt we were taken for granted. They need to do a better job with service and support with us,' he said.