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  5. The Sun Also Sets: Page 2 of 3
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The Sun Also Sets: Page 2 of 3

Just as 62% of Sun's shareholders last week approved Oracle's takeover offer multiple stories crossed my desk, OK my screen, relating to the combination of data deduplication technology and Sun's ZFS file system. Add in speculation about Oracle's plans for Sun's various product lines and what Larry Ellison will do when he controls two unrelated storage (Sun and Pillar) companies and Sun seems to be on everyone's mind.
Howard Marks
July 22, 2009

Now we stories about Sun releasing deduplication as part of
ZFS themselves including a Keynote session at last week's Kernel conference in Australia
titled "Deduplication in ZFS".  This
being America we also have lawsuits flying back and forth between Sun and GreenBytes
with Sun saying:

"GreenBytes has been trying to entice Sun to acquire
GreenBytes or to become an investor. GreenBytes invited Sun to review
GreenBytes' claimed de-duplication process pursuant to the parties' NDA. When
Sun ultimately rejected GreenBytes' overtures, GreenBytes responded by making
groundless claims that Sun had misappropriated GreenBytes' deduplication
process."

As well as accusing GreenBytes of infringing on the ZFS
trademark and registering the ZFS+ trademark without permission.

GreenBytes on the other hand has accused Sun of using their technology
in Sun's own deduplication efforts.

How did this once friendly relationship fall apart? We may
never know.  I'm sure the scrutiny of the
armies of lawyers working out the Oracle acquisition didn't help.  Someone at Sun may have also been upset about
GreenBytes rasing $7.5 million in May (SEC Filing here) and talking about
follow up models that weren't based on Sun hardware.

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