Features - Storage Innovations:

SUN ANNOUNCES RELEASE OF NEW 3300 SERIES

Continuing the momentum of Sun's recent storage management software and virtualization announcements, Sun Microsystems Inc has announced the Sun StorEdge 3300 Series, extending its promise of Complete Storage Solutions by delivering enterprise features into the workgroup. Available mid-October, the new storage arrays will bring added value to businesses with small to medium deployment requirements and enable customers to do more with less. With this new product series, the first being the Sun StorEdge 3310 SCSI array, Sun is extending its storage solutions offering to those customers who need scalable storage systems with enterprise flexibility, features and growth path.

Sun has responded to its channel partners and customers who are demanding higher and higher levels of flexibility and availability from their storage systems. Based on evolving customer demands, Sun is offering the Sun StorEdge 3300 Series with the goal of meeting the customer's demand for doing more in less space, paying for what they need when they need it, and having the availability of enterprise features at entry level prices. The Sun StorEdge 3300 Series strategically complements the Sun StorEdge product family, and is positioned underneath UNIX market leaders Sun StorEdge 9900, 6900 and 3900 Series arrays. It is optimized to Sun's entry level server line that includes the highly regarded Sun LX50, Sun Fire V120, 280R, V480 and V880 servers, and open to heterogeneous environments, making it the best choice for Sun customers who need compact, ultra-dense, ruggedized disk arrays to simplify storage planning and management.

"As customers value long term investment protection, we see a growing market demand for workgroup systems that have enterprise features," said Mark Canepa, executive vice-president of Sun Microsystems Storage. "We are continuing to deliver what our customers are asking for, flexible, adaptable, manageable storage solutions that are integrated into our customers end to end IT infrastructure. We did this with servers and now we're doing it with storage."

The Customer Benefit

Unlike the low-end storage boxes sold by others, Sun helps businesses to meet their small and medium application deployments by providing features such as hot swapping, scalability from gigabytes to terabytes, and durability to meet full NEBS level 3 compliance specifications. Due to the Sun StorEdge 3310 array's single to dual RAID controllers and simple Web GUI, customers can quickly and cost effectively expand capacity and easily add RAID controllers, Logical Unit Number (LUNs), and disk drives. For a customer to do this using a competitors product, they would have to buy additional equipment, shut down their systems, and back up to tape before they can begin to add storage capacity.

Also unique to this product category, the Sun StorEdge 3310 array includes remote management services software so that IT managers can meet their data storage needs wherever they may be located. It also provides the flexibility, adaptability, scalability, and performance requirements needed to grow their business efficiently, connecting to server systems without wasting precious data center space. By delivering these feature sets in a workgroup system to customers, Sun is providing the added value to meet evolving business requirements while at the same time making it simple to use and easy to manage. This makes the Sun StorEdge 3300 Series an ideal storage system for a broad range of customers including industrial, retail, life sciences, telco and government.

"We evaluated solutions from many leading vendors and Sun's new 3310 SCSI array ended up at the top of our list," said Bruce Baumgarte, member, group technical staff, Texas Instruments Inc. "It outperformed other solutions and delivered the advanced features we require to ensure our storage is scalable, flexible and manageable. Sun understands our needs and has designed this product to meet them."

Pending Customer Approval

Because Sun understands that customer environments are often heterogeneous, the new products support the Linux, NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, and the Solaris Operating Environment.

Designed for the Channel

Sun's channel partners can utilize the Sun StorEdge 3300 Series to meet the business, technical and cost requirements of mutual customers. In addition to the flexibility and performance benefits, the new Sun StorEdge 3300 Series is optimized to the Sun server environments, providing a great platform and cost-effective choice for partners to deliver end to end integrated business solutions.

About Sun Storage

Sun is a recognized multi-billion dollar industry leader in the UNIX and open systems storage market. Sun StorEdge Complete Storage Solutions, www.sun.com/storage/, are optimized for the Solaris Operating Environment and tailored to Sun's server platform, while supporting heterogeneous environments. Sun is a worldwide UNIX storage supplier, an external UNIX systems vendor in both terabytes and systems shipped, a storage provider in host-attached external storage, and has received the #1 storage ranking in the VARBusiness Report Card.

About Sun Microsystems Inc

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at sun.com.