New Sun storage systems herald enterprise features at entry-level prices

Sun Microsystems is bringing added value to businesses that have small to medium storage requirements. This follows the announcement of the Sun StorEdge 3300 Series, which the company says delivers enterprise features into the workgroup.

Kobus Landsberg, systems engineer specialising in storage at Sun Microsystems SA, says the local market, particularly the large number of users running multiple four- or eight-way Sun SPARC processors, will welcome the announcement.

"They're now getting enterprise-type features - normally associated with the big data centres - in a small footprint storage device. The Sun StorEdge 3300 Series features intelligent on-board RAID controllers, intelligent cache with caching algorithms and high levels of built-in redundancy," says Landsberg.

He points out that for potential and existing users, a large number of which are Internet Service Providers (ISPs), this brings added value to their small to medium deployment requirements and helps enable them to do more with less.

"With this new product series, the first being the Sun StorEdge 3310 SCSI array, Sun is extending its storage solutions offering to those customers who need scalable storage systems with enterprise features and capabilities," he says.

The StorEdge 3300 Series strategically complements the Sun StorEdge product family, and is positioned underneath Unix market leaders Sun StorEdge 9900, 6900 and 3900 Series arrays.

They are designed and tested to take full advantage of Sun's entry-level server line that includes the Sun LX50, Sun Fire V120, 280R, V480 and V880 servers. Also open to heterogeneous environments, these products are designed for Sun customers who need compact, ultra-dense, rugged disk arrays to simplify storage planning and management.

"Sun has responded to its channel partners and customers who are demanding higher and higher levels of flexibility and availability from their storage systems," said Mark Canepa, executive vice-president of Sun Microsystems Storage.

"With this announcement, Sun is meeting customer requirements for doing more in less space; paying for what they need when they need it; and having the availability of enterprise features at entry-level prices. We did this with servers and now we're doing it with storage."

Unlike the low-end storage boxes sold by competitors, Sun helps businesses to meet their small and medium application deployments by providing features such as hot swapping, scalability from gigabytes to terabytes, and durability to meet full NEBS level 3 compliance specifications.

Due to the Sun StorEdge 3310 array's single to dual RAID controllers and simple Web GUI, customers can quickly and cost-effectively expand capacity and easily add Logical Unit Number (LUNs) and disk drives. For a customer to do this using a competing product, they would have to buy additional equipment, shut down their systems, and back up to tape before they can begin to add storage capacity.

Sun's channel partners can utilise the Sun StorEdge 3300 Series to meet the business, technical and cost requirements of mutual customers. This makes it a suitable platform and cost-effective choice for partners to deliver end-to-end integrated business solutions.

From the high-end, to entry-level, Sun is now able to provide customers with an increasingly comprehensive product family that will be attractive to enterprises looking for flexibility in storage systems.