Sun Reveals Roadmap

Sun is planning to reinvigorate its storage business with high-capacity tape drives, encryption technology, and a slew of solutions built around the "Thumper" server/storage device, according to execs at its annual analyst summit yesterday. (See Storage Slows Down Sun and Sun Thumps Storage-Server Hybrid.)

The vendor also revealed how a pilot of its closely guarded "Honeycomb" technology is helping Google digitize millions of books. (See Google Groans Under Data Strain and Go Google Geeks.)

Sun, which has struggled to swallow its $4.1 billion StorageTek acquisition, has apparently been keeping busy in its research labs. (See Sun Returns to Profitability and Sun to Acquire StorageTek for $4.1B. "We have a number of innovative products going on," said David Yen, executive vice president of Sun's storage division last night. "We expect to not just catch up, but leapfrog the current market."

This will involve the rollout of "the most secure" tape encryption sometime this year, according to the exec, starting with the vendor's T10000 drive.

Sun announced device-level encryption on the drive last year; although Yen says that this will now be extended to the vendor's high-end tape systems, VTLs, and open platforms. (See Sun Encrypts Tape Drive, Sun Launches Tape Libraries, Sun Fills in Storage Crypto Details, and Sun Opens Tape Again.)Next year, the T10000 itself will also be overhauled, which Yen promises will double the drive's capacity to a Tbyte.

The vendor will also come out with a new midrange tape library, code-named Crimson, sometime in 2008. This will fit between the SL500 and the SL8500 as a midrange offering. (See StorageTek Ships 500th SL8500 and StorageTek Adds HP Support to SL8500.)

Briefly drifting off into hyperbole, Yen described the SL8500 as an "industrial marvel" and pointed out that Sun has already shipped 1,300 of the libraries, thanks partly to strong demand in the government sector. "All my tax returns are archived on this particular library in the IRS," he added, prompting laughter from the audience.

The exec also expanded on Sun's plans for its recently launched X4500 device, code-named "Thumper." (See Joyent.) "There are six storage solutions [for Thumper] in the works," he said, adding that the first of these, a VTL-based solution, will be launched in the second half of this year. Other offerings will focus on areas such as NAS, data warehousing, and video surveillance.

Certainly, the vendor needs to get its arms around its storage portfolio. Despite posting a solid set of overall Q2 results last month, Sun's storage revenues were something of a blot on the vendor's financials and were down 7 percent year over year to $626 million. (See Storage Slows Down Sun.)During last night's Webcast, Yen acknowledged the logistical challenges associated with the StorageTek acquisition. "It's a journey -- it's not an overnight black and white thing," he said, although he described the recent merging of the two firms' price lists as "the last major milestone."

Sun also gave a glimpse into the world of its 5800 device, code-named "Project Honeycomb." (See Kodak OEMs 'Honeycomb' and Advice for Sun.) During the analyst summit, the vendor wheeled out Michael Keller, a librarian at Stanford University to talk about how he is using 5800s as part of a major book digitization project with Google.

As with most things Google is involved in, this is no small undertaking. (See NASA.) "We're digitizing something like nine million books," said Keller, adding that this will amount to about a Pbyte and a half of stored data.

Honeycomb, which is essentially a high-end archiving system, is being touted as "programmable storage" by Sun. The idea is that the system can perform a number of processes independently of attached servers, including creating and maintaining metadata and handling SQL queries.

Stanford opted for Honeycomb after testing an archiving product from Archivas for about a year, although API shortcomings ultimately prompted Keller and his team to look elsewhere. IBM, he added, was also unable to deliver the level of interoperability that the University required. "The whole thing for us has been quite a long story," he said, noting that the University is now ready to absorb "hundreds of thousands" of books from Google.Sun's Yen also alluded to the rumblings of discontent from StorageTek users worried about support and roadmap issues during yesterday's Webcast. (See StorageTek Users Voice Support Fears and Sun Closes on StorageTek .) "One of the very high priorities, since last May, when the new management got in place, is to ensure the high level of satisfaction that StorageTek had," he explained.

During the Webcast there was no mention of Sun's 6920 platform, which was recently rumored to be an HDS acquisition target. (See HDS PrepsTagmaStore, Ponders Sun, Sun, Hitachi Talk Storage and Sun Storage Chief: We're Not for Sale.)

Sun bills the 6920 as a virtualization system, although HDS has its own midrange SAN systems with virtualization. (See Hitachi Plans Midrange Rollout and HDS Strips Disk.) That said, Sun has had little success selling the 6920, which is based on technology it acquired from Pirus in 2002 for around $165 million. (See Pirus Gets Sun Tan and Sun Beams on Pirus.)

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch