WASHINGTON, DC -- Sun Microsystems Inc., was full of promises about its plans for newly acquired Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) at the 17th annual StorageTek Forum user conference this week, but some users remained skeptical of the acquisition, mainly because of Sun's lack of experience in the mainframe arena.

"The overwhelming impression I got was that they did this for Sun and Sun only," said David Woodruff, storage manager for Visa. "There was a lot of talk about them becoming a higher ranked company in the storage market, and my thought was, 'hey, you've got customers, too.' "

"Sun is an open systems company," Woodruff said. "They don't know anything about the mainframe. They're not going to make as much progress with those products."

Woodruff was hardly alone. As part of the general sessions held at the conference Wednesday morning, Sun aired a videotape of users discussing their concerns for the acquisition -- a place where the mainframe worries were heard loud and clear.

It's not just Sun's lack of experience in the mainframe world that users said had them worried. Some felt StorageTek, too, had been leaving mainframes behind.

"In the last couple of years, they haven't seemed to be putting much into their mainframe products," said David Harris, senior storage manager for Visa. "Probably because they knew they wanted to sell out to an open systems company."

Nigel Dessau, vice president of the tape group within Sun's data management group , attempted to address the concern. "We are committed to [StorageTek's Virtual Storage Manager (VSM)] and other mainframe products," he said. "We have a roadmap and plans for specific performance improvements, although there are no specific announcements just yet.

"If Sun wasn't committed to the mainframe, if they hadn't convinced me of that, I wouldn't have taken this job," Dessau said. "You can't build tape without it. And if Sun wasn't going to commit to the mainframe, I'd say they just wasted $4.1 billion."

"They aren't as familiar with it," said Mehretab Berhe, manager of data center operations for Highmark, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. "But they have no choice. The mainframe is here to stay."

Rick Fink, storage administrator for Allied Insurance, said he wasn't sure where Sun would take StorageTek, but he knew what he hoped would happen -- that StorageTek's acquisition by a bigger company would help its market share and help convince his managers to stick with StorageTek to backup his IBM mainframes.

"Years went by before IBM had the capability to do snapshots at the data set level with their backups, unlike StorageTek's VSM," he said. "I hope they won't back down from the mainframe or from other vendors."

Fleming speculated that Sun's integration of Hitachi Data Systems Inc. products could eliminate some of StorageTek's V2X products in the long run. "They'll want to keep their relationship with Hitachi going," he said.

"Nothing has changed so far, and it's been 60 days," said Samuel Fleming, system analyst for storage management enterprise services with The Boeing Co. "We're feeling pretty confident. Confident enough that we just ordered new hardware from them -- we upgraded our whole VSM system for our IBM mainframe."

Fred Pharis, storage administrator for Convergys Corp., said the appointment of Eula Banks, head of services for StorageTek, had done much to allay his nervousness about Sun curtailing StorageTek's service department. "We have horror stories about service from the Sun side," he admitted, "But they put the StorageTek guy in charge of service, not a Sun guy."

"It would kind of be the tail wagging the dog," said Robert Abraham, president and analyst with Freeman Reports. "StorageTek's sales and service organization is many times bigger than Sun's."

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