Sun Microsystems Unveils NAS Platforms

NEW YORK—Sun Microsystems last week unveiled several new storage products that the vendor contends are twice as effective as their predecessors in the network-attached storage (NAS) space.

In general, a NAS device is dedicated to file sharing rather than the services expected of a hardware server. A NAS platform can interact with a network in a variety of ways, and might consist of many NAS devices.

The StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance comes one year after the unveiling of the StorEdge 5000, and lets customers scale via the addition of a single disk rather than an entirely new server, according to Sun. It is built on Opteron processors from AMD.

With the release of the StorageTek product, Sun will expand its "try and buy" program. Prospective clients will be given 60 days to test it free of charge, with the option to purchase at the end of the trial. Sun officials acknowledge that there is some financial risk with the "try and buy" approach, but say they are confident that customers will be pleased enough to eventually purchase the servers. The offering will be sold for a starting price of $49,990 for a 2.4 terabyte system.

Sun also introduced additions to its virtual storage manager (VSM) system, dubbed VSM system 4e and VSM system 5. They allow for data to be stored on a virtual disk and then migrated to a tape device. Customers can automate data movement, increase tape drive cartridge capability and reduce backup windows by up to 50 percent, Sun contends.

The VSM System 5 is intended for medium-to-large mainframe environments and doubles the performance of its predecessor, Sun says. System 4e is for smaller mainframe environments that want entry-level tape virtualization. Together, the VSM suite can scale up to 256 VSM systems controlled at a single point. Both system 5 and 4e will be rolled out within 90 days, Sun says.

Separately, Sun and Gigaspaces recently announced that Sun selected Gigaspaces' software solution as its middleware platform for Sun's newest trading initiative.

Gigaspaces will run on top of Sun's JavaSpaces technology in an effort to increase speed and volume, according to Sun. "Gigaspaces software handles the distribution of data and processing across the underlying infrastructure," says Donna Rubin, senior director of worldwide financial services at Sun, in a statement. GigaSpaces last month released version 5 of its infrastructure software solution, offered in two editions: a full-scale Enterprise Edition and an entry-level Caching Edition (DWT, April 17).