Sun Microsystems is delivering on its promise of allowing customers to deploy larger, heterogeneous storage area networks (SANs) with higher performance levels following the introduction of its new StorEdge Open SAN Architecture.
With this announcement, Sun is expanding its complete storage solution offerings to provide a consistent, unified SAN architecture that scales to meet business needs enterprise-wide. The architecture simplifies SAN management, optimises resource utilisation and ultimately lowers TCO across the IT infrastructure.
"Key to this announcement is the ability of StorEdge to inter-operate in foreign host environments," says Kobus Landsberg, senior systems engineer at Sun Microsystems SA.
He says Sun is addressing the fundamental interoperability problems that currently exist in the storage environment.
"Although there are some standards available, they are not very well defined and this has led to integration problems between the host computer, SAN switches, the storage issue itself and management software. Sun's drive is to manage these disparate systems from a single package and the introduction of the StorEdge Open SAN Architecture is a big step towards making this a reality," says Landsberg.
A Sun Microsystems US customer, Ron Rose, Chief Technology Officer at priceline.com., says: "We've been waiting for one of the storage players to provide a SAN solution to enable the consolidation of resources while optimising utilisation and manageability.
"These additions to the SAN infrastructure reflects Sun's commitment to open systems and supports customers' real-world environments which require high levels of interoperability, performance and scalability."
"Infrastructure consistency and open standards make it easier to design, deploy, manage and support a high-performance, highly available, massively scalable SAN solution. This consistency lowers TCO since customers can start small and scale up on demand with no wasted resources or painful transitions as they move from the workgroup to the high-end data centre," adds Landsberg.
In the management software space, Sun continues to execute on its Storage ONE software strategy with new StorEdge Diagnostic Expert software and enhanced versions of the StorEdge Resource Management and Availability Suites. The diagnostic software has the ability to both identify problems real time and provide advice about effective remedial actions.
StorEdge Resource Management Suite 6.0 removes management complexity and enables customers to optimise resource utilisation. New features include predictive trending, enhanced automation and custom reporting. Sun StorEdge Availability Suite 3.1 offers enhancements that significantly improve performance of replicating data from one SAN location to another - whether geographically dispersed or within the same building while reducing administrative overhead.
With these new products and software, Sun is now able to offer open, heterogeneous SANs with fabric support for Linux, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, HP/UX and IBM AIX-based servers, improved SAN performance and support for large, complex SANs.
"We're listening to our customers and driving the next wave in storage products, software and services," said Mark Canepa, executive vice president, Sun Storage. "Without a doubt, Sun is the only company that offers end-to-end SAN solutions with a unified infrastructure that scales from the workgroup to the high-end data centre."
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