The Sun product is called the 5310 Compliance Archiving System, and comprises an ATA- or Fibre Channel-based NAS filer packaged with software providing features such as WORM file locking software, audit logs, user authentication and a secure clock.

Compliance rather than mere reference data is the target market, and Sun’s announcement that it is shipping the 5310 in volume included a list of the usual data retention suspects such as SOX, HIPAA, and Basel 2.

Sun said that AXS-One, iLumin, Mobius Management Systems and Vignette have qualified their applications for use with the 5310.

The device will compete with EMC’s Centera, Hewlett-Packard’s RISS, IBM’s DR550, Storage Technology’s Intellistore, and to a lesser extent Network Appliance’s NearStore. The only major storage supplier yet to join the fray is Hitachi, which can only offer a WORM facility and has yet to launch a full-feature disk archive.

By the end of the summer Sun is very likely to have completed its proposed acquisition of StorageTek, giving it two disk archives the 5310, and the IntelliStore. Whether that means that the 5310 is just a placeholder until then is not clear.

Sun’s NAS market director Tom Martin said the two could just as easily co-exist as overlap. Although the 5310 will appeal to the midrange of the market, the Intellistore will play best in very large applications, where its tape-friendliness will be a major advantage, Martin said.

But the 5310 carries a list price of $81,995 for 6TB ATA configuration, making it only slightly cheaper than the IntelliStore. The Intellistore list prices begin at $75,000 for a 4TB configuration, with additional 1TB increments costing $9,000 each, making 6TB total cost $93,000. Street or dealer discounts will reduce that price difference.

Sun’s choice of name for the 5310 – Compliance Archiving System adds to the confusion about what the acronym CAS stands for. As Content-Addressed Storage, the acronym originally referred to a process by which data contents are hashed to create address tags. This is also called object-oriented or object-based storage, and is embodied in EMC’s Centera, HP’s RISS, and StorageTek’s Intellistore.

But because this meaning has become so strongly connected with EMC’s Centera, some vendors have attempted to re-invent CAS as meaning simply Content-Aware Storage. Now Sun has created a third interpretation.

Although object-based storage is not an explicit requirement of any data retention regulations, it offers a degree of intrinsic data security and authentication that must be object-based storage is not an explicit or even implicit requirement of any data retention regulations.

There have been successes with both forms of technology, for NAS players and for CAS players. The question is about how much value customers see in CAS, he said.

Sun also sells a Content Infrastructure System, which Martin said is designed for the storage of much larger volumes of reference rather than compliance data.