Sun Ships Little, Talks Big

During Sun Microsystems' quarterly product launch today, the company unveiled a new NAS system, managed services, and enhancements to its Virtual Storage Management (VSM) mainframe virtual tape systems. (See Sun Unveils Services.)

Beyond that, the session turned into an extended effort to prove the company is still serious about storage -- though the talk was more about roadmapping than actual products.

First, a rundown of today's announcements:

• The new Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS appliance, like its predecessor, the 5310, uses software Sun acquired from Procom last year. (See Sun Buys Procom NAS Assets.) The 5320 also is Sun's first NAS product built on the AMD Opteron chip and uses Sun's Galaxy server. Sun claims a 55 percent performance increase over its previous NAS appliance, the 5310. The 5320 scales to 179 Tbytes and pricing begins at $49,990 for 2 Tbytes.
• Additions to VSM include a high-end system that doubles capacity to 29.8 Tbytes and an entry-level version for smaller mainframe environments. The systems, which compete with mainframe VTL products from IBM and Fujitsu Siemens, will be available by August.

  No details were given for VSM for open systems -- a product for which StorageTek was already late when the Sun acquisition took place. Sun execs insist they will deliver Open VSM but aren't offering details. "Stay tuned on that one," says James Whitemore, VP of marketing for Sun's data management group.

  The Sun crew has to hope its customers will stay tuned, especially with no shortage of open system VTL products around now -- including one it sells based on software from FalconStor.