Sun Upgrades Storage Offerings

The company's Galaxy family of high-performance servers is based on architecture it got as part of its acquisition early last year of Kealia, a company founded by one of Sun's original co-founders, Andy Bechtolsheim, now senior vice president of the company's Network Systems Group, and feature single-core or dual-core AMD Opteron processors.

On the storage side, the company unveiled a number of new products including a new NAS gateway, new tape automation systems, a new low-cost family of arrays, and support for remote replication on its midrange storage array.

Despite plans to rebrand all Sun storage with the StorageTek moniker following this year's acquisition of StorageTek, Monday's new products came with the legacy StorEdge badge.

New from Sun is the 5310 NAS Gateway, which is similar to its 5310 NAS appliance but with no internal storage. Instead, the 5310 NAS Gateway uses the storage capacity of other Sun arrays, including the 6920, 9970, and 9980, and testing is being done on the 9985 and 9990, said Randy Kerns, vice president of strategy and planning for Sun.

The gateway, based on intellectual property acquired this spring from NAS vendor Procom, is currently available. It lists for about $54,000, or $81,000 for two units configured as a high-availability cluster, Kerns said.

Sun also introduced new tape automation units primarily targeted toward channel partners in the small and midsize business.

The C2 autoloader is a 2U-high unit with an LTO or SDLT tape drive. With eight open tape slots, the unit lists for $8,295. A 16-slot model lists for $9,695.

The C4 is a 4U tape library with space for one or two tape drives, and comes with a built-in bar code reader. Sun OEMs the model from Quantum. A SCSI LTO-2 version with room for 38 slots lists for $11,990, compared to $15,990 for an LTO-3 model. A SDLT with room for 32 cartridges lists for $12,790. Fibre Channel versions of these three are also available for about an additional $5,000.

Sun also bumped up the performance of its 3000-series of storage arrays, which it OEMs from Dot Hill, with the addition of the 3320. This model includes an Ultra320 SCSI interface, compared to the Ultra160 SCSI interface of its existing 3310, which over time will be replaced, Kerns said.

Also starting Monday, Sun's model 6130 array will support synchronous and asynchronous replication for use with campuswide and WAN replication. List price for the feature is $25,995, not including the two 6130 arrays needed to do the replication, he said.