Features - Storage Innovations:

SUN EXPANDS STORAGE FAMILY WITH BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATION

During its quarterly Network Computer '04 launch, Sun Microsystems Inc unveiled a broad range of innovative new storage offerings that further position Sun as the single source for data management. The announcements include:

• The Sun StorEdge 6920, a revolutionary midrange storage system that sets a new standard in scalability and price/performance, beating competitors IBM and HP by more than 35 percent in price/performance, per recent Storage Performance Council (SPC) benchmark results.
• The Sun StorEdge 9990, a new high-end enterprise storage platform with breakthrough virtualization, replication and data movement capabilities that leapfrogs competitors with its next generation architecture.
• The Sun StorEdge 5210 NAS device with heterogeneous operating system platform support that simplifies deployment and can be set up in less than 15 minutes.
• Enhancements to Sun's industry-leading file system software, StorEdge SAM-FS/QFS.
• The Sun Content Infrastructure System, a new customer-ready solution tailored to meet today's complex data management needs through a completely assembled, tested and configured deployment platform including server, storage and software.
• Unique OS integration with the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS).

"Customers are crystal clear with us. They want to reduce cost and complexity and leverage their data assets to gain competitive advantage," said Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Network Storage Products Group at Sun. "We're uniquely positioned to meet enterprises' business needs with a system spanning the server, operating system and storage. From this vantage point, we can attack cost and complexity like never before."

Innovating Storage: Introducing A New Way To Consolidate And Scale

Sun announced the availability of the Sun StorEdge 6920 and the Sun StorEdge 9990 arrays, providing never before seen control of physical assets, ease of allocation and massive consolidation abilities on two different classes of storage.

"With the introduction of these two new systems, Sun arguably has one of the best stories for SAN-based storage," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "ESG research has shown that customers are looking toward storage virtualization as a way to significantly drive down total cost of ownership. Only Sun has products that provide this functionality in both the midrange and high-end."

The new Sun StorEdge 6920 system is designed to help reduce the costs and improve services by consolidating applications on a single system that offers N-way scalability, application-oriented storage pooling, simplified management and centralized services. Additionally, the Sun StorEdge 6920 system is one of the first midrange-class storage systems to feature a crossbar architecture that flexibly scales capacity, connectivity and performance. The system's unique architecture has been recognized by the Storage Performance Council as having the best scalability and price/performance for the midrange class of storage.

Coupled with the Sun StorEdge 9990 array, which was announced earlier this month, the new Sun product line-up for enterprise storage is stronger than ever. The Sun StorEdge 9990 array provides unparalleled performance to support massive consolidation and aggregation with virtualization, replication and migration capabilities across disparate platforms. As with the Sun StorEdge 6920 array, the 9990 system is able to unify data and storage services across its own storage and attached storage systems, streamlining storage management and productivity.

Revolutionizing The Procurement Of Storage Capacity

The new Sun StorEdge 6920 array is also available with Utility Computing pricing, growing Sun's pay-for-use storage solutions. The new, all inclusive, pay-for-use Sun Utility Computing for Midrange Sun StorEdge Systems, starting at only 80 cents per Sun power unit (SPU) per month, can help customers reduce capital expenditures, improve asset utilization, scale storage needs and align storage costs to business activity. By leveraging the new pricing model, customers receive storage capacity when it is needed at an attractive, predictable price.

A Single Source For Storage Needs

Sun Network Storage is also adding the Sun StorEdge 5210 NAS system to its product portfolio today. For entry-level departments and workgroups who need to share documents, the Sun StorEdge 5210 NAS is a heterogeneous file server that is simple to manage and deploy, with virtually seamless integration and flexible policy-based services.

With its complete line-up of storage products, Sun also offers state-of-the-art file systems, Sun StorEdge SAM-FS/QFS. In addition to file sharing and policy-driven archiving, the newest version, 4.2, now supports Sun Cluster software and Oracle RAC applications with HA QFS shared file systems.

Underscoring its commitment as an end-to-end systems provider, Sun is also introducing today the Sun Content Infrastructure System. This completely assembled, tested and configured deployment platform includes server (Sun Fire V240), three different types of storage mediums, and Sun StorEdge SAM-FS arrays for policy-based management. The solution, currently available in three different configurations to meet Information Lifecycle Management needs, has a single part number for each complete configuration.

The Ultimate SAN OS

The Solaris 10 OS is one of the most SAN-ready operating systems available and will be delivered with Sun's integrated SAN software stack, featuring StorEdge Traffic Manager. This provides customers with automated load-balancing and fail-over for direct or SAN-attached. The Solaris 10 OS can automatically discover and configure thousands of storage elements in a SAN environment without requiring manual configuration or server reboots, saving customers time and money.

"We have Solaris 8, 9, and 10 systems as well as Linux systems attached to the Sun StorEdge 6920," said Jed Dobson, systems architect at Dartmouth College. "The SE6920 provides a centralized storage system that enables Dartmouth to connect heterogeneous systems to a single SAN. We are now able to leverage a single storage pool to create volumes for each system as they are needed and reconfigure [easily] as storage requirements change."