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Looks Like Same Old Sun
First storage announcement post-StorageTek buy amounts to minor tuneup of existing line
September 12, 2005
2 Min Read
The StorageTek acquisition wont provide any quick fixes for Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) storage.
Sun’s new storage products announced today look a lot like Sun’s old storage products, and newly acquired StorageTek doesn’t figure in the rollout at all. The handful of storage products Sun announced today were in the works long before the StorageTek deal closed. They even retain the StorEdge brand, although Sun says it will use the StorageTek brand on future storage products following its $4.1 billion purchase (see Sun to Acquire StorageTek for $4.1B) and Sun Sets on StorageTek).
“These products were already in the pipeline prior to the decision to change the brand name,” says Randy Kerns, Sun’s VP of strategy and planning. “They’ll have the StorEdge name, but as we roll out new versions or new products, they’ll have the StorageTek brand.”
The latest Sun products come from the acquisition of NAS vendor Procom Technology Inc. and partnerships with Dot Hill Systems Corp. (Nasdaq: HILL), Engenio Information Technologies Inc., and Quantum Corp. (NYSE: DSS). Here’s a quick rundown of the “new” stuff:
StorEdge 5310 Gateway: This is the gateway version of the midrange StorEdge 5310 NAS announced last November (see Sun Pushes Into NAS and Sun Streamlines Storage ). Now Sun lets customers connect the NAS system to its SAN arrays -- but not to other vendors’ storage. “That’s because we sold it primarily into Sun environments,” Kerns says of the 5310 NAS box. “We haven’t tried to displace anybody else.” Sun’s NAS line comes from its $50 million acquisition of Procom.
StorEdge 3320 array: This is a low-end parallel SCSI array from Dot Hill, replacing the 3310 model. That’s right -- parallel SCSI, at a time when serial attached SCSI (SAS) is right around the corner (see SAS Shows Its Face). “SAS is coming, but not today,” says Kerns, who adds Sun wanted a system to pair with its spankin’ new Sun Fire servers (see Sun Spawns Galaxy).
Advanced Data Recovery for StoreEdge 6130: This is Engenio-developed replication software to go with the 6310 midrange system Sun sells, which is based on an Engenio controller. It supports synchronous and asynchronous remote replication.
StoreEdge C-Series Tape: No, not even the new tape products come from StorageTek. Sun’s new entry-level tape library and autoloader come from Quantum. StorageTek doesn’t sell low-end tape products.
Don’t expect any big announcements on integrating the Sun and StorageTek platforms, either. Sun will keep just about everything that both companies have been selling for now and slowly integrate the two platforms through quarterly updates.
“Almost all of it will stay,” Kerns says of the StorageTek and Sun storage products. “There’s very little product overlap.”
— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch0
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