This is not going to be a major product launch, it’s going to be about us talking about our strategy, the company said.

The only new products that will launched will be updates to Sun’s mainframe tape emulator and compliance-tailored NAS gear, and a service product consisting of a half-day workshop about ILM.

But Sun will also show off its Honeycomb CAS disk archive, due to ship this summer, and pitch the coming integration of its access control software with its storage management tools. Sun said it will also demonstrate a device codenamed Thumper. According to previous reports, this is a high-end device that has been in development for some while. Sun would give no details itself.

All this will be part of a strategy that focuses on data, and will flip the market on its side. The plan will cover ID Management, virtualization, embedded security, and an integrated data management platform, Sun said.

The updates to what was originally StorageTek’s VSM mainframe tape emulator should help reassure former StorageTek customers that Sun has not abandoned the product, despite its disdain for mainframes.

But in an advance briefing with Computer Business Review, Sun would not say when it will ship a in-house developed Open Systems VTL or tape emulator. Such a product has been in development at StorageTek for some while, and the box is running very late.

In the interim, Sun last year quietly began selling a place-holder VTL based on software OEM’ed from FalconStor Software Corp. Exactly the same software powers EMC Corp and IBM Corp’s VTLs, so at least Sun is in good company.

Honeycomb is the CAS box that Sun first talked about early last year. It is already on early-access release, and will become GA this summer, Sun said. Compared with other CAS devices such as EMC’s Centera or Hewlett-Packard Co’s RISS, Sun promised that the Honeycomb will offer third-party software developers much more extendable and programmable facilities to store and access meta-data.

When Honeycomb ships, it will become Sun’s third disk array aimed at the compliance market. Sun already sells a StorageTek-originated IntelliStore CAS device. This will continue to be sold, and will be positioned downmarket from Honeycomb, Sun said.

How long will IntelliStore survive as the poor relation of Honeycomb? At least a little while apparently, as Sun said that updates to IntelliStore are already being planned.

Sun’s third compliance-aimed disk array is its 5310 NAS device. Unlike HoneyComb or IntelliStore, this features a conventional, non object-based non data-hashing file system, even though it was dubbed the 5310 CAS device by Sun. That was CAS as in Compliance Archiving System, not content-addressed storage as everybody else understood CAS to mean.

The 5310 sports WORM file locking software, audit logs, user authentication and a secure clock.

The CAS label for the 5310 has been dropped, and the box itself has been replaced by a larger and faster version called the 5320.