Local StorageTek Legacy

When I first moved to Colorado, I was fascinated and amused, sometimes twice per day on the school run, I’d pass Tape and Disk(or was it disc?) Dr. The roads led to nothing. and empty site, full of scrub grass and weeds. I’d always assumed it was a failed tax break development scheme. This seemed particularly likely as there is a large multi-property multi-family housing development across the street.

I was surprised recently on a Wednesday morning ride when one of the guys I was riding with declared he used to work at StorageTek there. I was fascinated. Although I remember IBM had a plant here that developed laser printers, but I knew that location was sold to Lexmark.

Rather than the roads leading to an undeveloped location, the location had at one time been a thriving location. Some poking around on the Denver Business Journal website revealed the story, and google maps had some pictures of the site in better days and from I36 you can even see some of the buildings. The picture below is a 2008 aerial picture of the site. Disk Dr is the road onto the site in the upper right, and Tape Dr on the lower right.

From the Denver Business Journal

• Sun completes StorageTek acquisition(Sept. 2005)
• Martin leaves impressive legacy at StorageTek(Oct. 2005)
• Secrecy shrouds buyer of StorageTek site(Jan 2008)
• ConocoPhillips to build campus on former StorageTek site in Louisville(Feb 2008)
• Phillips 66 pulls the plug on Louisville energy campus(Oct. 2012)

Asides from questions about the future of the site, the only real question is when did the site transfer between Louisville and Broomfield cities, see pictures above.

Oracle gets big on Sun

Predicting the Future, The Oracle concept watches by Designer Andy Kurovets mixes time with Chinese philosophy

Fascinating news. I didn’t see a single consultant, analyst, journalist predict this. WRT to the supposed IBM/SUN on/off deal, I guess the biggest part to work out is how this will effect Oracle products on IBM Power Systems servers.

Oracle was definately the most significant software product on Power systems, I assume if Oracle decides it wants to keep the SPARC hardware architecture alive, it’s going to have to start favouring SPARC over Power. If nothing else, one assumes the fees IBM pays Oracle for Power support/currency/testing etc. will likely go up. Fascinating indeed.

I guess that also puts Oracle into competition with Dell and HP too, not just becuase of their SUN x86 hardware, but also again for platform currency. I didn’t dial-in to the investor call this morning, but I wonder how many are already wondering what the chances are of Oracle spending a year to work out how to sell-off the parts of Sun it doesn’t want, like the hardware business, but keeping the bits it does want, like Java and the other key software assets and intellectual property. Fascinating indeed.

However, if this knoxnews.com picture is anything to go by, Oracle have some work to do on their Industrial design and human factors for their hardware.