New Storage Gear Announced by Sun

Published: May 4, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

At the Network Computing 06Q2 product launch event this week, Sun Microsystems talked a little bit about the future Solaris 10 6/06 update, including the new Zettabyte File System, and hired a new head of its Sun Software unit (see the separate stories in this issue for more on that), but the bulk of what Sun talked about was storage.

At the event, Sun announced the StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance, which is based on a cut-down "Galaxy" Opteron server and using the Opteron 252 processor, which is a single-core chip running at 2.6 GHz. Sun says that the new NAS appliance has about 55 percent more oomph than the X86-based StorEdge NAS appliance it replaces. While the Opteron chip can be deployed in a two-socket machine, the board inside the 5320 NAS has only one socket; it supports 4 GB of main memory, which is used for caching data, and has four base Gigabit Ethernet ports, with an optional two more links. It also has two dual-port 2 Gbps Fibre Channel host bus adapters, and has a native iSCSI block access protocol and support for the CIFS/SMB, NetBIOS, NFS v2 and v3, and FTP file access protocols. Solaris 10 and Windows support iSCSI links, Windows requires CIFS, and NFS is used to support Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Linux. The 5320 NAS supports up to 179 TB of capacity (including expansion units) using 400 GB SATA, and up to 134 TB of capacity using 300 GB FC drives. A base unit with 2 TB of capacity costs $49,990.

Sun also announced two new Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) systems from its formerly independent StorageTek unit, the VSM 4e and CSE 5, which are aimed at mainframe shops. The VSM machines are essentially funky disk arrays that are programmed to look like tape drives and are used to archive data. The VSM 4e is an entry configuration of the existing VSM 4, which scales from 1.25 TB to 14.9 TB. The VSM 4e comes with two configurations, with 800 GB and 1.25 TB of capacity, and 8 GB of cache memory instead of 32 GB in the VSM 4e. The VSM 5 is a beefed-up version of the VSM 4, and scales from 1.25 TB to 28 TB of storage capacity. The VSMs require Sun's Host Software Component 6.0 and Virtual Tape Control System 6.0 software, and work with IBM's z/OS 1.1 or higher mainframe environments. Prices were not given.