Features - Storage Innovations:

SUN ANNOUNCES NEW SOLARIS 10 STORAGE SOLUTIONS

At its Network Computing '04Q4 (NC04Q4) launch, Sun Microsystems Inc announced new storage offerings designed to help enterprise customers simplify and improve data management, protection and compliance. With the announcements, the Sun StorEdge family of storage solutions is expanding to reflect the company's unparalleled commitment to providing value through a single, integrated management interface and a robust set of data services.

The announcements include:

• Sun StorEdge Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM) 3.0 software that can dramatically reduce management complexity for storage administrators by eliminating the manual processes they are forced to rely upon today. It is a standards-based platform for management of heterogeneous storage devices and provides integrated storage resource management, provisioning and storage network management.

• The Sun StorEdge 5310 NAS device, a fast, easy-to-use, multiprotocol appliance that adds enhanced scalability options and advanced business continuity functions to Sun's StorEdge 5000 NAS family. The mid-range 5310 appliance provides anywhere from 10 to 30 times the storage capacity of the entry-level Sun StorEdge 5210 appliance, depending on the type of drive the customer chooses, delivering additional flexibility with the choice of both Fibre Channel and Serial ATA (SATA) configurations.

• Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving Software for the 5310 NAS appliance that can help customers meet federal and regulatory data compliance requirements by providing access controls, retention policies and authentication of data integrity.

• The Sun StorEdge 6130 array, previewed in late October, that can provide advanced data protection, round-the-clock availability and applicationoriented configuration for budget-conscious enterprises. The new array allows customers to leverage benefits typically found in higher-end products. In addition, this highly-flexible array enables the deployment of multiple storage classes including low-cost SATA and high-performance Fibre Channel.

• The Sun StorEdge L500 tape library that offers the highest scalability in its class. It protects more than 100TB of information and simplifies management to help IT administrators more efficiently consolidate storage and address business and regulatory compliance requirements.

"Storage customers understand that integrated, open solutions provide the greatest business value to their operations," said Mark Canepa, executive vice president of network storage at Sun Microsystems. "With [the] expansion of our storage portfolio and the announcement of Solaris 10 -- the leading storage-optimized OS on the market -- we continue to deliver open, streamlined management and integrated data services for customer choice and flexibility. Sun is uniquely positioned to offer customers of all sizes, in all major industries, a complete data infrastructure that provides these benefits, and we intend to aggressively attack the multi-billion dollar storage market."

Simplifying Heterogeneous Storage Management

With the new Sun StorEdge Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM) 3.0 software, customers can leverage the benefits of truly open, integrated storage management to simplify the administration of their heterogeneous storage infrastructures, improve system availability, and achieve better resource utilization and higher levels of productivity. Using Sun StorEdge ESM 3.0, IT organizations can manage multi-vendor storage networks through a single, webbased platform with features like discovery, visualization, monitoring, reporting, chargeback and provisioning. With automated capabilities, flexible development tools, and customizable policy and reporting engines, Sun StorEdge ESM 3.0 can be used to create an internal storage utility that aligns storage resources with business objectives.

"Customers need a wide range of storage hardware solutions to meet their varied workloads and application service level agreements," said John McArthur, group vice president and general manager at IDC. "At the same time, however, they want unified management across the full range of products. Solutions such as the Sun StorEdge Enterprise Storage Manager software, help customers achieve greater efficiency and reduce management complexity in heterogeneous storage environments."

New Choices For Regulatory And Business Compliance

Sun is expanding it NAS offerings with the introduction of the Sun StorEdge 5310 NAS appliance that is designed to scale with customers' business needs while providing advanced continuity features. The appliance expands to 65TB of raw Fibre Channel capacity or 179TB of raw SATA capacity and fits into virtually any heterogeneous environment.

The Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving System combines the power and simplicity of the Sun StorEdge 5310 NAS appliance with Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving Software to create a pre-configured archival appliance. The Sun StorEdge Compliance Software helps regulated information remain unalterable for its designated retention period, and helps ensure its security, integrity, accuracy and authenticity.

The system stores and protects customers' vital information assets while helping meet specific compliance requirements. Its flexibility allows customers to choose the best configurations for their unique environments, addressing availability, capacity, performance and cost. Retention policies are enforced at the file system level which allows files to be written in a write-once read-many format, thus ensuring that any data written in this format cannot be modified or deleted during the retention period. Robust security features -- including audit logs, user authentication and access controls -- combine to help protect the integrity of vital digital information.

The Compliance Archiving System is built to easily integrate with leading content management applications, including, among others, Vignette Records & Documents, to provide customers with a choice for their total compliance solution. "The deep integration between Vignette's records and document management solutions and Sun's storage solutions will provide customers the benefit of multi-layer enforcement and protection," said John MacLean, senior director of product management at Vignette. "Working with Sun, Vignette delivers superior customer solutions for initiatives such as secure, compliant storage of enterprise records and the automation of complex business processes. Customers gain the benefit of enterprise scalability and rich out-of-the-box capabilities through solutions that leverage Java-based architectures from both Vignette and Sun."

In addition, Sun introduced the Sun StorEdge L500 tape library. This new library is specifically designed to support the growing number of businesses that need a highly scalable tape automation solution for storage consolidation and business and regulatory compliance. The L500 tape library architecture balances current needs with future requirements by scaling from a 50- to 500-cartridge capacity to protect more than 100TB of data in a rackmount footprint.