Now that last week's executive shuffle at Sun Microsystems is old news, what's next for the company?

Sun got back to business Tuesday, launching its new approach to data management that's focused around four key functions: identity management, virtualization, encryption and software integration. Scott McNealy, former CEO and current chairman of Sun and now Sun Federal, was met with a standing ovation as he kicked off the keynote session at Sun's quarterly Network Computing event in Washington, D.C.

Like EMC and a number of other companies that offer storage products, Sun is looking to evolve its offerings into a platform for overall data management, focusing on availability, business continuity and the ability to apply policy to information through the lifecycle of data from creation to deletion. The new platform incorporates its own technology as well as products inherited with last year's acquisition of StorageTek.

"It's really all about the data, not the storage," McNealy said. "It's about retrieval, conditional access and identity management. [We] have to change the approach."

This new approach is being packaged as the "information management maturity model," or IM3, and incorporates the various products in Sun's portfolio. Unlike IBM, which McNealy says handles data in a custom way, Sun focuses on integration across the system.

By applying identity management to stored data, customers can determine who has access to data throughout its life cycle, said Nigel Dessau, vice president of Sun's tape business unit. To provide better access control, Sun is tying its Java Systems Access Manager into the StorageTek Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM), which is a Web-based tool that lets administrators monitor, report and provide chargebacks on multivendor storage networks. In addition, the Java Identity Auditor will be paired with the Sun StorageTek 5300 series to better integrate identity management with information life-cycle management (ILM).

Among the products launched is the Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS appliance, based on an AMD Opteron processor, which brings a 60-day Try and Buy offering for comparison against its Network Appliance competitor. The Virtual Storage Manager 5, a virtual tape solution for mainframe environments, doubles capacity and performance over its predecessor, while Virtual Storage Manager 4e provides a scaled-down alternative for small and midsize customers. All three options -- Virtual Storage Manager 5, the previous version 4 and 4e -- function together seamlessly. Also supporting storage solutions is Sun's Managed Operations for Storage service, offered through the network of partners, which provides data and storage management and monitoring through remote backup and restore.

NEXT: Sun's upcoming new file system, a service to complement its security offerings and Project Honeycomb.