Sun Ships Little, Talks Big

During Sun Microsystems' quarterly product launch today, the company unveiled a new NAS system, managed services, and enhancements to its Virtual Storage Management (VSM) mainframe virtual tape systems. (See Sun Unveils Services.)

Beyond that, the session turned into an extended effort to prove the company is still serious about storage -- though the talk was more about roadmapping than actual products.

First, a rundown of today's announcements:

If you think the above announcements aren't nearly enough to make up the ground Sun has steadily been losing to rivals such as EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Network Appliance, you're not alone. Scott McNealy and the Sun brain trust spent most of today's press conference and Webcast divulging plans for propping up storage after spending $4.1 billion on StorageTek last year. (See Sun Sets on StorageTek.) Even so, little time was devoted to discussing the specific products Sun picked up in the acquisition. (See StorageTek Users Voice Support Fears.)

Storage itself was downplayed. Mark Canapa, EVP of Sun's data management group, described Sun's storage strategy as "a systems approach that involves more than just storage. Our vision is a lot broader."

Sun's big picture focus included a demonstration of a clustered archiving system based on the Honeycomb project the company has talked up for more than a year. (See Sun Pushes Into NAS .) The system demonstrated was a 19u cabinet with 321 Tbytes of disk built to retrieve digital content and other large files quickly. Sun executives say customers are using the product now, but general availability and more product specifics are still at least a few months away.

Security also figures prominently in Sun's strategy -- but that too is on the waiting list. Sun laid out a plan for identity management, which builds access controls, authentication, and audit trails into Sun's Enterprise Storage Management (ESM) software. Sun picked up identity management technology in a 2003 acquisition of Waveset and has used it in its Solaris operating system but not in its storage products.

Another security feature Sun touted today is encryption. More than four months after revealing plans to build encryption into the Sun StorageTek T10000 tape library, Sun says that feature will be available in late summer, along with services for setting up key management. (See Sun Fills in Storage Crypto Details.)At least one customer commented positively on today's news. Bill Paraska, director of IT for Georgia State University, says he's using the StorageTek 5320 NAS system along with a enterprise SAN system that Sun sells through an OEM deal with Hitachi Data Systems. Paraska says he found it easy to set up and use and is considering adding a second 5320 in a disaster recover site 35 miles from the main campus.

Paraska hasn't looked at the Honeycomb product yet, but archiving is high on his list of priorities. "That's what everybody wants, a good archiving system," Paraska says. "We can do server optimization, server utilization, and get processing down to an affordable point, but we haven't done anything about data storage, and that stuff's killing us. We're looking for a hierarchical system so we can really spend our dollars on backing up critical information and not spend money and stuff that's not so valuable."

Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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