Sun hasn't made major inroads against storage
specialists such as EMC and Network Appliance or against
storage products from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, but the
company doggedly refuses to give up in its mission to supply
almost everything a data center operator needs. It upped the
ante by acquiring StorageTek in 2005 in a move that provided
Sun with much-needed revenue growth but drained $3 billion
in cash from its coffers.
Sun is counting on a new generation of products to help turn
things around. One is the StorageTek 5320 NAS, a midrange
network-attached storage system that costs $50,000 for a
2-terabyte entry model--though the company will let
customers try it free for 60 days under an expanded
try-and-buy program.
The 5320 is emblematic of Sun's attempt to integrate various
technology assets into a useful storage product. It bears
the StorageTek brand that the company is adopting for all
its products in an attempt to profit from that company's
greater penetration into the storage market. Its operating
system comes from Sun's purchase of Procom assets in 2005,
but Sun will move it to its Solaris operating system in
coming quarters, said Mark Canepa, executive vice president
of Sun's Data Management Group.
And the 5320 uses central electronics taken from AMD Opteron-based
"Galaxy" line of x86 servers Sun began selling last year.
Its predecessor, the 5310, used Intel chips.
Honeycomb plans
More Galaxy-based Opteron systems are in the works,
including the delayed "Honeycomb" system, which is designed
to promulgate Sun's idea that storage should take on
processing chores that servers handle today.
"If you want to do something with the data today, you move
the data to the server and do something. The new approach is
move the computation to the storage," Canepa said.
The approach relies on extra labels on data called metadata
that gives a handle on otherwise nontextual information such
as medical X-rays or an archive of baseball videos. "If I
want all of Curt Schilling's curveball pitches, the system
can search for those," Canepa said.
Honeycomb systems had been due in 2005, but now are
scheduled to arrive only "within the next few quarters,"
Canepa said. "At this point we want to make sure we get it
right (and) to marry it correctly to the right
applications."
Also in the works is Project Thumper, which is designed to
help store data that's not used for database transactions or
that's not mission-critical, Sun said.
Sun also is working to make sure its storage deals well with
a world where individual servers are carved up into numerous
virtual machines, a major trend in the computing industry.
"Data centers are moving from a few dozen reasonably well
behaved servers (to) a data center with tens of thousands of
applications, all of which want to access storage," Canepa
said. "You've got to be able to take one large storage
capability and virtualize it into tens of thousands of
separate ones."
A major item on Canepa's agenda--and on that of Chief
Financial Officer Mike Lehman--is ensuring the StorageTek
integration works. Canepa said the formerly separate
companies have a unified product plan, sales team, services
team, and sales incentive plan.
In other storage-related announcements:
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Sun has integrated its identity management
software with StorageTek tape technology. The result: "Only
the right people with the right rights can access the data,"
Canepa said.
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Sun plans to announce its delayed ZFS, or
Zettabyte File System, software that governs how information
is read and read from storage systems. Sun plans to release
ZFS in an update to Solaris 10 due in June, and make
computers able to boot from ZFS-formatted disks by the end
of the year. ZFS has a 128-bit address space that gives it
"virtually unlimited data capacity," Sun boasts, while
nipping data transfer errors in the bud, easing management
tasks, and featuring a design Sun projects will last 20 to
30 years.
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Sun released the new Virtual Storage Manager
5 and a lower-cost VSM 4e, tape products that connect to
mainframes. One important reason for acquiring StorageTek
was to penetrate IBM mainframe customer accounts, Sun has
said.
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Sun tape drives also will include built-in
encryption "at prices that make it look essentially
invisible," Canepa said. That's an important factor for
customers who live in terror of losing a tape packed with
sensitive records.
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