Once again Sun made a mea culpa for its previous neglect of the storage market, in which its already weak sales have been slumping recently. We’ve suffered five years of having gaps in our storage products. For the first time we’re highly competitive, said Sun’s chief technologist Chris Wood, repeating almost exactly what he said during Sun’s last storage launch in September.
The SRM and SAN management software that Sun is OEMing from start-up AppIQ has been integrated into Sun’s Enterprise Storage Manager version 3.0. Sun has added to its recently launched Procom-based NAS box with a larger device. It has also released Worm file retention and compliance software, and shipped a smaller version of its Midnight Special or Content Infrastructure System integrated archiving software and hardware package.
Sun said that in the first quarter next year it will ship a twin-processor NAS device, to be followed in the second half by two four-way NAS gateways. These will be right up there with the highest of Network Appliance’s hardware. We intend to go from top to bottom in NAS, said Sun’s chief technologist Chris Wood. In the longer term, Wood said Sun is developing a high-end NAS clustering system with Procom Technology Inc, the OEM supplier of the firmware and file system driving Sun’s current NAS hardware. This clustering system will be based on Sun’s SAMFS file system.
Sun will also begin reselling around three third-party software packages early next year, covering content management, SAP archiving, and email archiving. Wood did not say which companies will supply that software, but did mention Arkivio as an email archiving supplier.
The integration of AppIQ’s software into ESM 3.0 is a huge step forward according to Wood. Quite frankly, until now we haven’t been so good at managing third-party equipment, he said. Until now Sun’s SRM offering has been based on the software it acquired with the $400 million stock-swap purchase of start-up Highground Systems Inc. Wood said that while Highground provided traditional SRM chargeback and capacity planning functions, it did not cover performance monitoring or SAN topology.
The smaller version of Content Infrastructure System will plug an entry-level hole, Wood said. The new single-processor Procom-software-powered NAS box is called the 5310, and scales from 25TB to 64TB.
From a customer’s perspective The Worm software launched by Sun as separately licensed software is very similar to NetApp’s SnapLock product, except that according to Wood it will not be so easy to inadvertently apply a retention lock to a file.
