Sun boss scorches rivals and open source

Sun chief executive Scott McNealy was on scathing form this week at a conference to extol the virtues of green IT and sustainable computing.

Speaking at the Executive Forum event just outside Glasgow, Scotland, McNealy was his typically rambunctious self, adding grid computing and open source to the usual industry hit-list which traditionally includes Sun rivals IBM and Microsoft.

Commenting on Sun's $4.1bn (£2.4bn) acquisition of tape-specialist StorageTek last week, McNealy hit back at analysts who claimed the move wasn't decisive enough to improve the company's flat performance.

"People say, 'Tape is kind of boring'. Well, I say go in and tell your customer that you have lost their back-up tapes and you'll see excitement pretty quickly," he said.

However, the Sun boss did admit StorageTek's massive price tag had stung the company slightly. "We did have $7.4bn in the bank until the StorageTek deal. They burnt a little hole in our pockets there."

McNealy said the move would enable Sun to offer a more complete storage management service to customers than any of its rivals and the StorageTek products would fit with Sun's existing hierarchical storage management software. "You can buy the piston ring from EMC or you can go to Sun and buy the whole truck," he said.

McNealy claims companies should look to use grids of virtual computers for their processing needs and hosted applications instead of the current situation where businesses spend millions on bespoke technology. The difference, he claims, is between delivering a parcel by building a van from scratch or using FedEX.

Next on the hit-list was open source, with McNealy attacking the widely held view that the Linux operating system is cheap, compared with Sun's own Solaris OS or Microsoft's Windows, or even free. "Open source is free like a puppy is free," he quipped, hinting at long-term costs and hassles, and occasional clean-up jobs. This is despite the fact that Sun recently began releasing Solaris under an open source licence.

Sun is also keen to be seen as a leading player in grid computing - where computing power is shared by multiple users over an extended network - but McNealy wasn't afraid of making some digs about the latest technological trend.

"Grid is the new term for computing environment. If you want to be cool then just say 'grid' and wear a pony tail," he quipped.

Sun turned on its Sun Grid, a large pay-as-you-go computing grid, at its company HQ recently and discussed how grid computing will transform the computing world. In the Sun Grid, consumers pay $1 for each CPU-hour and then run their computing problems on a bank of servers and storage systems owned and maintained by Sun.

Commenting on the old enemy Microsoft, the tone was fairly conciliatory with McNealy showing a picture of himself shaking hands with Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer. Sun and Microsoft signed a deal last year.

However the Sun boss couldn't resist a small dig, claiming that technology existed for companies to ease the migration from Microsoft systems by running Windows on Sun's thin client hardware. "You can move to thin clients without having to go cold turkey. Think of it as methadone," he said.

Andrew Donoghue writes for ZDNet UK