Sun Sings New Storage Song

NAS: Perhaps the biggest gap for Sun is the NAS market, which it will reenter in August or September as a result of the joint venture agreement it signed with Procom Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: PRCME) earlier this year (see Sun, Procom Form Alliance).

Wood called Sun’s being out of the NAS business “an oversight.” Sun invented NFS, the main file system used in NAS, but included it in systems that were not dedicated solely to NAS. “We now have religion,” Wood says. “We have had off-and-on NAS offerings that were not best of breed, and our customers have told us that.”

Wood says the system coming this summer will be the first in a series of NAS offerings. The first NAS system -- based on BSD Unix -- will be positioned between higher-end NetApp appliances and the low-end Windows-based systems sold by Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), HP, and EMC.

Advanced storage features: The new StorEdge 6920 midrange system will feature intelligence technology acquired from Pirus for around $165 million in 2002 (see Sun Beams on Pirus and Pirus Gets Sun Tan). Wood says the Pirus switches will contain snapshot, remote replication, and data migration capabilities in the first systems that ship in July or August. Sun plans to add mirroring and other functionality through software upgrades. Pirus switches will be available in 16- and 24-port configurations.

Wood says plans call for the Pirus box to be available on the 3000 series of lower-end SANs, and next year it will support Clariion and IBM FastT arrays for heterogenous systems.

High-end SAN: On the SAN high end, Sun is offering a pay-for-use option for the StorEdge 9980 array. Customers will pay a monthly charge based on capacity, features such as replication and snapshots, and support. Sun says the pricing begins at $0.02 per MByte per month. Wood says the utility computing option is for customers running mission-critical applications who know they will need more storage eventually. Recent polls show a growing interest in utility computing (see Users Mull Utility Computing ).

SATA: Sun launched a new low-end system, the StorEdge 3511, which is a SATA system manufactured by Dot Hill Systems Corp. (Nasdaq: HILL). (See SAN Snacks From SNW.) Sun positions the system for secondary storage. It offers up to 12 drive bays for 3 TBytes of capacity. Pricing ranges from $15,995 for a system with five drives and no controllers to $47,995 for 12 drives and two controllers. SATA is an area where Sun's competitors are picking up speed (see SATA Saturates SANs).

Data migration: Sun also enhanced the SAM-FS and QFS software in its StorEdge Performance Suite to improve data migration. SAM-FS will allow customers to automatically archive new or changed files; and the QFS file system scales to 1 PByte -- four times greater than the previous version (see Next-Gen File Systems).

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch0