Sun Picks New Server, Storage Chiefs

The executive carousel continues its merry-go-round at Sun Microsystems, with the latest changes coming under the aegis of new CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

The systems vendor today tabbed John Fowler as executive vice president of Sun’s Systems Group, a role that combines the Sparc and x64 systems groups.

Fowler, who was heading up Sun’s x64 machines, will assume responsibility for the company’s UltraSparc IV+ and T1 servers from David Yen.

Yen stepped into a new role within Sun as executive vice president of Sun’s Storage Group, effectively taking over for Mark Canepa, former head of Sun’s Data Management Group.

Canepa has decided to leave the company, Sun said in a statement. The company did not say why or whether Canepa was leaving to take another position.

Fowler and Yen will report directly to Schwartz, who last month took over for founding CEO Scott McNealy amid a whirlwind of executive turnover at Sun.

McNealy handed Schwartz the CEO reins last month after the company reported a net loss of $217 million, or 6 cents per share in its Q3 as compared with net loss of $28 million, or 1 cent per share a year ago. (McNealy will retain his title as chairman of Sun.)

“We see alignment and acceleration opportunities in combining our systems efforts,” Schwartz said, explaining his executive shuffle.

“Bringing the two organizations together allows us to leverage the best of our industry standard supply chain to fuel Sun’s ability to capture the global opportunity to deliver the fastest, and most energy efficient systems on earth.”

Schwartz and Co. have big plans to improve Sun’s server and storage sales on the strength of multi-core systems such as the UltraSparc T1 architecture and the Honeycomb storage file system.

The new appointments of Yen and Fowler come two weeks after Rich Green left Cassatt Corp. to rejoin Sun as executive vice president of Sun’s software group.

Green took over for John Loiacono, who jumped ship for Adobe in March.

Michael Lehman rejoined Sun as CFO in February replacing Steve McGowan, who retired. Lehman had been CFO at Sun from 1998 to 2002.