The Blog of Ben Rockwood

Sun's Next Branding Blunder: xVM

04 June '08 - 08:39 by benr

I really hate bashing Sun, but I've gotta speak out against Sun's continued moronic branding. Following in the tradition of "N1", "Java Enterprise System", and the horrible replacement of the good brand StorEdge with the misused StorageTek brand (applied to everything from long time Sun Arrays to Adaptec controllers), comes xVM.

Lets look at the definition of "brand":

4 a: a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer : make b: a characteristic or distinctive kind

By my reckoning, "Sun" would fit definition A, and "StorEdge" would fit B. Using a brand to cover an overly broad grouping of applications, such as Identify Management, Cluster, database, and app server is in my mind too broad and thus is confusing unless marketed as a single unified stack, which for instance JES commonly isn't.

The xVM brand will cover all Sun virtualization technologies eventually it would seem. When used alone, xVM refers to Xen. xVM Ops Center appears to be a replacement for the existing (remaining) N1 tools, namely N1 System Manager and N1 Provisioning Server (did these ever get traction?). Even VirtualBox, a desktop VMWare/Parallel's competitor that Sun is moving toward the server space, is now "xVM VirtualBox". One can only assume that Solaris Zones and LDOM's will come under the xVM brand as well... although as a major Zones fan I can't help but notice Sun's decreasing attention to them which is often completely absent from marketing presentations about Sun's virtualization strategy.

Brands are hard to build and they should long endure. The Sun ONE, N1, JES transitions only confused customers and duplicated marketing effort needlessly. xVM is now going to bring unrelated virtualization technologies under a brand translated as Xen and span market segments, not to mention that Ops Center is first and foremost a systems management application, not a virtualization product. What happens when a customer says to me "I need a tool to improve datacenter deployments", and I reply "xVM Ops Center is the tool for you!", and he says "xVM is that like Xen or Virtualization or something? I'm not using virtualization"... what do I say? "Umm... well, xVM Ops Center does virtualization, but its really much more than that."

Whoever made the decision to confuse customers yet again with this xVM branding strategy, thanks. I'm certain it will cause pain for years to come.

- - C O M M E N T S - -
amen

omphile (Email) - 04 June '08 - 11:08

I have to tell you… you’ve been right on with the last couple of posts. Keep at it!

Dave Pickens (Email) - 04 June '08 - 13:32

It did help getting Sun into yesterday’s list of 10 server room must-haves though…; see [[http://www.serverwatch.com/news/articl..]]. But other than that, I tend to agree with you.

Bert Bouwhuis (URL) - 04 June '08 - 15:22

Sun’s Marketing Department needs a major revamp. 1) I think engineering should control the names of products, since marketing has proven they can’t do it. For example, why bring back the Ultra name for workstations—when Sun Blade was a decent name, although easily confused as a blade server. And then mixing processor types in the new Ultra workstation lineup..

2) Marketing should be disallowed from naming two products similarly… for example SMC and SunMC. Two products doing completely different things, yet consumers would mistake one for the other.

3) Marketing should also not be allowed to use the Java name on stuff that well, frankly doesn’t contain any or very little java. For example, the Java Desktop System-~~aka GNOME, or Java Enterprise System~~-which was the former N1 software stack.

Now, I agree it was nice they tried to unify the naming of the software apps, as it was hard to be a field support guy—and keep track of all of the software that Sun sold and offered support on.

4) Did we really need to rename Veritas’s Volume Manager to Solstice Volume Manager?

Dennis Behrens (Email) - 04 June '08 - 16:43

Dennis, VxVM is not the same as SVM

As for the article, I can’t agree more. Down with xVM (as a ‘brand’)!

Lewis (Email) (URL) - 04 June '08 - 17:30

I gotta agree, I’m a little disappointed with Sun’s current strategy regarding Solaris. They seem to be more interested in running other OS’s, using Solaris as a base, instead of concentrating on making it the OS of choice. I’m a big fan of zones, and they were heading in the right direction adding useful features, such as individual IP stacks, but where’s the love gone now? xVM ( Xen ) could be good, but to honest, all places I’ve worked that are virtualising their environments are using VMware.

And don’t get me started on the forgotten SPARC child….

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fwboodol (Email) (URL) - 05 June '08 - 00:54

I’ve been complaining about this for years. I generally find Sun products to be well designed and produced, but Sun marketing and Sun legal are a real mess.

Ops Center is the munging of Sun Update Connection for the Enterprise (ake UCE (worst name ever) aka Aduva (an acquisition)) and the N1 stack.

We’re a huge Zones user and various groups not recognizing sparse zones (in particular) has caused lots of minor annoyances (e.g. I don’t want the default install of Explorer to drop private data into the shared /opt so it can be read by non-global zone administrators).

The Linux guys at work are huge Xen users. While it’s been great for a lot of the smaller services, it really blows on any service that does real work. The corporate direction was that all Linux servers should become Xen unless there’s significant justification otherwise and it’s caused as many problems as it’s solved (Xen and I/O don’t play well together and a few cluster upgrades have required a full cluster outage amongst other things).

So, Xen may be cool (and may be the popular choice at the moment), but for many tasks, Zones are much better suited.

Paul (URL) - 05 June '08 - 20:45

Another unfortunate aspect of the xVM name is that XVM, the storage volume manager from SGI, is still alive and well in my neck of the woods.

No SGI is not out of business, and yes they’re doing a brisk business selling big shared memory parallel computers. They’re not trying to sell workstations anymore (A Dell with an NVidia card beats anything they can do, and for a fraction of the price), but they have focused on a niche that only they can address.

Anyway, except for the case of the [xX], it’s a namespace collision that dilutes the brand for those in the HPC world. It usually ends up being pronounced “XVM, I mean Sun’s hacked up version of Xen”. Granted that most of the Unix world can use LVM, ZFS or Veritas, and granted that HPC and virtualization are orthogonal technologies in a lot of ways. But since they bothered to call it xVM rather than XVM, Sun’s marketing folk probably new that they were going to confuse someone at least a little—and went ahead with it anyway… Or maybe they just wanted to stick it to SGI. In any case, I now have yet another jargon-namespace-collision to stumble around in meetings.

Luke (Email) - 24 June '08 - 11:58

I read your article and agree on a level with you. Sun should fire their whole marketing staff, they couldn’t sell water to thirsty desert dwellers, much less market tech to IT. I wish that these folks would stop trying to be clever, and realise how much confusion they create with these stupid names. I went to Sun website (it is pants) to get info on what is this xVM, and gues what, nowhere do they really explain it. There is all kinds of marketing speak, but no real substance. sigh…

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utteklyDatnek (Email) (URL) - 01 August '08 - 21:20

Sun is not the only one who constantly changes brands. Look at IBM. RS/6000->pSeries->System p->Power Systems. Or AS/400->iSeries->System i. Or, AIX 4.x->AIX5L v5.x->AIX 6.1 (with no 6.0). Or Micropartitions->Advanced Power Virtualization->PowerVM.

It simply boils down to buzzwords. Because of VMware, “VM” is buzzier than LPAR or LDom, etc., so PowerVM and xVM become the names of choice. Same way with “Enterprise Service Bus”. Remember EAI, hell, remember CORBA? CORBA->EAI->Web Services->SOA->ESB. Or “Internet” and small “i”, and Grid Computing and adding “G” to everything.

So you are right. Brands should not be specific to the product or function, because when the product or function changes slightly, there is a temptation to change the brand, or misuse the brand. Case in point, when Sun came out with the UltraSPARC I processor, they stamped “Ultra” on everything. The workstations were just called “Ultra 1” and “Ultra 2”. The servers were called “Ultra Enterprise”. Later Sun canned the “Ultra” moniker from the servers, so they were just called “Enterprise”, leaving “Ultra” as the workstation name. So later, after the fiasco of “Sun Blade”, and “Sun Java Workstation” desktop brands, Sun’s x86 guys commissioned a survey on Sun desktop brand awareness, and found “Ultra” had brand appeal, so the new Opteron workstations were branded “Ultra”, to the groans of every former SPARC person at Sun.

That all said, brands should be sufficiently generic. Some of Sun’s product names were sufficiently generic to make good brand names. “Creator” was just an awesome name for a workstation. Sun had that name out before the term “creative professional” was widely used. I mean let’s face it, Creator is synonymous with God.

I’m sure every company out there has similar branding horror stories. Look at the Ford’s Taurus->500->Taurus and Taurus->Freestyle->TarusX fiascos.

As for StorageTek, I personally think that is a brand worth preserving. StorEdge brings back memories of A5000s and T300s.

Mark - 14 August '08 - 21:33

A few more thoughts on product naming. There were some at Sun who wanted to call ZFS “Infinite File System”, which could not be abbreviated IFS, because Oracle had a product called Internet File System (aka IFS).

Now, if you look at filesystems, they tend to become known by TLAs ending in “FS”. Also, the first letter for many filesystems tends to be from the latter part of the alphabet: UFS, VxFS, XFS, etc.

Despite this, and the panache of the tagline “ZFS: The last word in filesystems.”, there were some who did not want to call it ZFS.

Then the decision to call the Solaris virtualization feature “Containers”, which seemed incredibly boring, actually caused Virtuozzo to change the description of its technology from “Virtual Private Servers” to “Containers”.

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