Sun Offers Storage Software Under Subscription Pricing Model

Under JES, Sun charges for software on a per-employee, per-year basis to allow customers to treat the software as a predictable expense rather than making customers purchase software and upgrades.

Tuesday's rollout of the new Java StorEdge Software solution is the first time customers can purchase Sun storage software in a similar way, said James Whitemore, vice president of marketing for Sun network storage. Using the JES model, customers of the new offering get storage management software with one license, one price and one contract for everything in the software stack, he said.

The Sun Java StorEdge Software Solution, which was formally introduced on Tuesday during Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun's quarterly product rollout, consists of four new storage management software suites.

The consolidation suite addresses heterogeneous storage resource management, SAN management and application-aware storage. The business-continuity suite includes backup, snapshot, mirroring, replication, migration and virtualization applications. The content and life-cycle management suite includes content and e-mail archiving, content search and policy-based data management across storage classes. The compliance suite is focused on e-mail and document retention with policy-based migration and archiving.

The suites can be purchased separately, or as an entire package. The entire package can be purchased in one of two ways, either for $350 per employee, per year or on a per-Tbyte basis starting at $400,000 per year for 5 Tbytes of managed capacity.

Sun this week also detailed its plan to turn storage into a utility. Whitemore said that starting in July, Sun will make storage capacity available to service providers and large enterprises for use in remote archiving and recovery, at a cost of $1 per Gbyte per month. This price includes policy-based management and security, as well as all necessary service-level agreements and quality-of-service guarantees.

Sun also is unveiling flexible managed storage services to large enterprise customers ranging from basic provisioning to reporting to managing an entire SAN, using engineers certified by the Storage Networking Industry Association, Whitemore said.

The utility and service offerings will start rolling out this month, he said. A pilot program for solution providers around the new offerings is planned for next quarter, with a complete channel program expected by year-end, he added.