Sun Microsystems Inc claims to have changed traditional storage from passive systems on single platforms to intelligent multi- platform offerings with its Intelligent Storage Network Architecture, and its new Sun StorEdge family of storage products. The company modestly reckons the new family of heterogeneous storage systems will once again force the industry to follow Sun’s lead. StorEdge provides a series of building blocks to enable users to pick the right storage for their needs. Jewel in the crown is the A7000 Intelligent Storage Server, a two, quad-processor Unix system which runs applications traditionally run on the main server, such as information sharing, remote data copy and back-up at the storage level. It supports Solaris, S/390 mainframes, Unix and Windows NT servers. Sun has also announced its Sun StorEdge DataShare software which enables direct sharing of mainframe, Unix and NT data without file transfer. Other StorEdge offerings include the A1000 workgroup array and the A3000 RAID 5 and OLTP-optimized system.
