2008 for Sun.

The new year is 4 days old. I thought a little bit about this year in regard of Sun: 2008 is a very important year for Sun. This year will show, if some of the bets, Sun made in the last year will show their pay-off. The first bet is our open-source strategy, especially regarding Opensolaris. Project Indiana will have it´s releas in the first half of this year, and we will see, if the market and the communities will accept this additional official distribution.

The second bet is Victoria Falls. As i stated before: VF is more important for us than Rock. The acceptance of this devices is important for Sun in the next few years. In my opinion, this systems will be a huge success and it will pave the way for other systems in development right now.

The third bet: Opensolaris as a storage operating system. This one will be interesting, we aren´t a single trick pony, who has to protect it´s high margin high end storage business at any costs. Thus we can do some reinvention here: When you keep the immense power of off-the-shelf-networking, off-the-shelf-storage and off-the-shelf-processors into consideration as well as their price, coupling with an scalable, general-purpose operating system in conjunction with some specialized storage feature can be a really disrupting factor in the next few months and years. The rise of commodity hardware for high end storage is inevitable. The single question: Who will win the race as the basic operating system? Linux, Solaris, one of the BSD´s. Opensolaris has an edge with ZFS, UltraSPARC T* and the CDDL (yes, CDDL has some advantages, when you want to build your business on it), but the race is still open.

2008 will be interesting for us and our customers. I´m sure we will have success. The end of this this year will show it.