Sun Microsystems is to simplify its sstorage software and roll out
hardware featuring technology licensed from Vicom Systems in a bid
to establish itself as a premier enterprise storage provider.
On the software side, Sun is re-packaging its 70-plus storage
software products into four simplified suites, said Mark Canepa,
executive vice-president of storage products for Sun.
Sun will now offer four storage software suites: a Resource
Management suite, a Utilisation suite, a Performance suite, and an
Availability suite, Canepa said.
Two new families of storage sub-systems are also being introduced
by Sun, the Sun StorEdge 3900 series and 6900 series.
Designed for high-performance storage environments, the 3900 series
is a Fibre Channel product with two direct attach connections that
support as much as 11Tbytes of data. The 3900 series comes
cluster-ready and offers advanced management features such as
phone-home capabilities in the event of a system failure. It
supports Sun's Solaris operating environment as well as Microsoft
NT, and support for other Unix flavours such as Linux will "follow
shortly," Canepa said.
The 6900 series is designed for storage consolidation and offers
11Tbytes of storage capacity as well as up to 512 logical unit
numbers (LUNs) and 14 direct attach connections.
Both the 3900 and 6900 series are built upon the foundation of
Sun's T-3 storage array and have integrated storage virtualisation
technology for allocating and re-assigning storage capacity
throughout a Sun storage network. Storage capacity using existing
T-3 arrays can be added virtually, using software, or by physically
adding T-3s to the hardware devices.
"If customers have T-3s today they can take those T-3s and open up
the door of the box, add another T-3, and augment [the new systems]
with existing T-3s," Canepa said.
Software technology from storage virtualisation company Vicom has
been licensed by Sun to assist in virtualisation as well as
expanding previous LUN limitations of the T-3. The Vicom
virtualisation technology will control primarily Sun-only storage
networks, according to Vicom.
"The T-3 has had serious limitations, particularly when it came to
the number of LUNs you could create from it. You could only get two
LUNs out of it, for example," said analyst Arun Taneja, of the
Enterprise Storage Group. "The virtualisation piece that comes from
Vicom essentially gives Sun the ability to create up to 512 LUNs on
a T-3, so they are using the Vicom technology as a component to
make the T-3 whole."
However officials from Veritas Software believe it is way ahead of
Sun in offering storage software tools that can virtualise and
control not only T-3s but also third-party systems from other
vendors such as IBM, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard.
Veritas will next week add to its storage software arsenal new
Veritas ServPoint Appliance Software, which it will roll out over
the course of the next two months. ServPoint software products for
both network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks
(SANs) will let users assign appliance-like storage serving tasks
and storage capacity to mixed vendor devices within their choice of
storage network, said Roland Schmidt, senior director of products
management for Veritas' appliance software division. The Veritas
software also works with Sun's T-3.
ServPoint NAS Appliance software for Sun's Solaris operating
environment is already available from Veritas. Intel-based and
Linux-based versions of the same are due within a few months.
ServPoint SAN Appliance software is currently going into the beta
testing stage, Schmidt said.
Sun works closely with Veritas and licences many of Veritas'
software tools, but for Sun, having a complete in-house storage
software stack is vital to building its image as an enterprise
storage player.
With its new storage software and hardware strategy, Sun officials
are confident that the company is now on a level playing field with
storage competitors such as IBM, Compaq and EMC.
Repeated assaults, like that by Veritas, on Sun's potential storage
market made the time ripe for Sun to make a stand and defend itself
as an enterprise storage vendor, Taneja said.
"Sun is a very strong server player with a very weak storage
offering. It has been the least desirable in the market place,
which is why EMC, Veritas, and others have had a field day on it,"
Taneja said. "So Sun is doing the right thing by saying, 'Look,
stop, I want my unfair share of the storage part of the business'
because up to now [Sun] has not been getting their fair shake."