I don´t know, if Chris Mellor was invited to a presentation of the S7000 storage series or what he did there (if he was invited) besides of drinking coffee, eating cookies and living in it´s own reality. Anyway ... if you need another reason to put him on the large heap of journalists of questionable quality, you should read his
last article:
The Sun 7000 business model, with its commodity hardware aspects, is good news in Oracle-land, but its open source software is not. Not to Oracle, any way. Neither is the bag-of-bits aspect of the 7000's software environment particularly attractive to many customers. Here are the software lego blocks; now build the storage array hardware and software system yourself. No thank you. I want to have an easier time implementing my storage array.
Chris, the last time i´ve looked at the S7000 series, it was a appliance you order completely integrated with storage, software and server. Just like your beloved NetApp, Chris. Those systems are nothing much more than than storage, servers and software ...
There was a time, when an negative article at the Register could be an nail to the coffin of a product, now many articles are nails to the coffin of the Registers reputation.