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June 19, 2000
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Sun Does About-Face On Storage Systems Offerings
StorEdge T3 marks the vendor's refocus on small, application-specific systems
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aving failed to achieve success selling the high-capacity, centralized storage system it gained with its acquisition of Encore Technology in 1997, Sun Microsystems is back to pushing its model of small, scalable, application-specific storage systems. The vendor last week unveiled its StorEdge T3 Enterprise Array, which will offer customers just under 1 terabyte of capacity when it ships next month. The system is an improvement over Sun's existing midtier offerings, the StorEdge 3500 and 5000 series, says Dataquest analyst Roger Cox. The new unit provides more robust fault-tolerance features, better management capabilities, and instant image capture and network data replication software. It also offers full Fibre Channel compatibility for better performance, with Fibre Channel ports on its drives and external connections. The T3 consists of dual controllers, 256 Gbytes of mirrored cache, and enough 18- and 36-Gbyte disks to create almost 700-Gbytes of capacity.
BlueLight.com, the Web-site development company formed by Kmart Corp. and SoftBank Venture Capital, is looking forward to upgrading from the 5200 to the T3. Ghufran Ahmed, BlueLight VP of engineering, says he expects the T3's scalable design and improved performance to meet his company's needs as capacity requirements double to 8 terabytes of data. Though it can't compete with EMC Corp.'s high-end Symmetrix storage systems, Sun storage "performs well enough for what we need," Ahmed says.
Customers who want to create a higher-capacity enterprise system can easily snap together multiple T3 devices, according to Sun. The T3 initially will support the Solaris, Windows NT, HP-UX, and AIX operating systems. In the fall, Sun plans to add support for Linux and Windows 2000, and for clusters of Sun servers.
Sun also plans to begin supporting a wider range of Fibre Channel switches and Fibre Channel directors to work with its storage hardware on storage area networks. In addition to reselling Ancor switches, the com-pany says it will certify switches and directors from Brocade Communications, Gadzoox Networks, McData, and Vixel. Pricing for StorEdge T3 Enterprise is expected to start at $91,000.
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