Sun Continues StorageTek Integration, Offers Strategy

Sun Microsystems Tuesday continued to integrate technologies gained from its US$4.1 billion purchase of StorageTek last year and sought to clarify its overall strategy for storing, managing and securing data throughout the enterprise.

Identity management, virtualization, security and integration of technologies are the four key pillars for Sun’s strategy, said officials at the company’s Network Computing event in Washington, D.C., which was webcast.

New products rolled out include the Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance, a network-attached storage device that uses AMD Opteron processors and both Fibre Channel and Serial ATA drives. Also new are the StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) 5 virtual tape appliance for mainframe environments, which doubles the capacity of its predecessor, and the new StorageTek VSM 4e, an entry-level tape virtualization offering for smaller mainframe environments.

On the identity management side, Sun integrated technology it acquired in 2003 from Waveset Technologies into its StorageTek Enterprise Storage Manager software, to discover, monitor, report and charge-back users for storage resource use.

“Identity is the most critical component of a secure ILM architecture,” said Scott McNealy, at the event in one of his first public appearances as chairman.

Businesses are struggling to manage the explosion of data created from the rampant use of the Internet and the increase of data such as blogs, podcasts and videos, McNealy said.

“It’s all about the data, gang; it’s not about the storage,” McNealy said. “The world is changing. We are moving from the era of the Internet age into the participation age, where everyone is on the Internet and everyone is a publisher, an editor.”

As businesses are facing increasing challenges in the areas of energy, heating, cooling and space, McNealy held up Sun’s thin-client computing devices as an energy-efficient way to compute.

“We’re all about focusing on outfitting the data center so you can participate in the digital participation age without torching the planet,” McNealy said.

Sun also rolled out new services to help businesses manage data, called Managed Operations for Storage, which bring in capabilities from its acquisitions of StorageTek and SevenSpace and are geared to help businesses lower storage-management costs; increase application, database and transaction performance through reporting, provisioning and storage allocation; and decrease risk of data loss.

The company also launched its Information Management Maturity Model workshop to help businesses identify weaknesses in their information lifecycle management strategies.

Sun also said it would add its next-generation Zettabyte file system, geared to automate tasks for storage administrators and increase data integrity, to a version of the Solaris 10 operating system shipping in June.

-Shelley Solheim, IDG News Service

For related news coverage, read Sun’s 1.8GHz UltraSparc Delayed to Next Quarter and All Eyes on Schwartz to Turn Sun Around.

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