Sun to highlight new storage strategy, products

Sun is expected on Tuesday to announce a new storage strategy along with new products aimed at helping customers managing their increasing amounts of data.

At its quarterly Network Computing product launch, the company plans to unveil a new four-step data management strategy that focuses on identity management, virtualization, security and easily integrated storage systems and software.

The company will also unveil the Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance, a network-attached storage device that uses an AMD Opteron processor and intermixes Fibre Channel and Serial ATA drives. Sun is also expected to announce new versions of its Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) system, a virtual tape appliance for mainframe environments. VSM 5 and VSM 4e maximize tape cartridge utilization, save on data center floor space and optimize batch processing.

Sun has integrated the identity management capabilities of its Waveset acquisition with its StorageTek Enterprise Storage Manager software, allowing customers to discover, monitor, report and charge-back users for storage resource use.

The company is also planning to announce a new service offering called Managed Operations for Storage that is designed to lower IT staffing costs and decrease storage resource management software licensing. It will improve database performance via reporting, and improve storage provisioning and allocation under service-level agreements.

Further, Sun intends to preview Projects Honeycomb and Thumper. Honeycomb is Sun's content-addressable storage array that consists of processors that can be scaled horizontally to create a low-cost clustered architecture. The Sun StorageTek 5800, aka Honeycomb was demonstrated at the National Association of Broadcasters show two weeks ago. It uses metadata to identify and classify data stored on NAS devices and file servers throughout the network.

Project Thumper will allow customers to store nontransactional and nonbusiness critical data. Both Honeycomb and Thumper are in beta test, according to documents Network World found.

Finally, the company plans to begin sponsoring an Information Management Maturity Model (IM3) workshop for customers implementing information lifecycle management (ILM). The workshop will help customers identify the strengths and weaknesses in their ILM strategies and promote improvements.

In other news: Dot Hill, which manufactures low-end storage gear for Sun, announced that Sun has informed Dot Hill of its decision to rely on another vendor for a low-end entry-level storage product.