By William Fellows
Sun Microsystems Inc says the storage services and subsystem technology acquired from Encore Computer – including the flagship A7000 array – will finally go up on Sparc/Solaris beginning in six months time. VP network storage Jeff Allen told ComputerWire that remote mirroring, heterogeneous data sharing and all of the Encore services will be supported, though they’re likely to get new names. Encore’s data sharing software, which still appears to be unique in the industry, allows for the direct sharing of mainframe, Unix and NT data without file transfers. That facility currently requires Encore’s own Unix core operating system running on an Intel co-processor. This is what Sun is porting to its Sparc/Solaris. Industry watchers, including Wall Street boosters, have been critical of the execution behind Sun’s storage division, now headed by Janpieter Scheerder. Allen denies there’s any problem with A7000, he says it is simply that demand for its 3500 and 5000 series Fibre Channel arrays has remained higher than it had anticipated. Sun’s storage area network (SAN) strategy also calls for browser-based remote management and it is using the StoreX initiative – Java APIs which provide a storage management structure – to leverage the development efforts of other storage players to unseat its storage rival, EMC Corp. Allen is convinced EMC cannot and will not migrate away from its microcode-based architecture and characterized the recently launched FibreAlliance initiative to create SAN management specifications as an attempt to take proprietary EMC APIs and layer them into what are already standard Fibre Channel interfaces. We don’t need it, says Allen, the FibreAlliance people are Sun partners anyway. Moreover Fibre Channel technology is all about interconnecting and plumbing: EMC isn’t a network company, he insists, remember you can only run EMC software on an EMC box. He says Fibre Channel manufacturers can already enable their hardware and software products to be aware of each other by exposing the management interfaces of their products to StoreX APIs. In any case, he says, FibreAlliance is another piece of plumbing. StoreX can work with it.
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