Putting a fresh face on its modular storage 
systems, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) 
on Thursday unveiled the first two products in its StorageTek modular storage family -- the Sun StorageTek 6140 and 6540 arrays.
Sun is targeting midsize to enterprise customers with the products, and hopes to hit the sweetspots for that market: quick deployment, non-disruptive flexibility, complete system availability and lower overall costs.
Modular storage is designed to help lower the total cost of ownership by enabling businesses to choose the performance level and mix of technologies that are appropriate to an organization's needs -- with room to grow.
Combined Entity
The Sun StorageTek 6140 and 6540 arrays are the first new products to be released under the combined Sun StorageTek roadmap.Sun completed its US$4.1 billion acquisition of StorageTek last August, boasting that the combination created a global leader in network computing and data management with combined revenues of $13.3 billion in the previous 12 months. Analysts were bullish on the merger, but have been waiting to see the fruit of it.
Sun said the modular family incorporates the best of both companies -- heterogeneous service and support expertise from StorageTek and end-to-end systems expertise from Sun. The new family of modular storage products also delivers a full suite of data services and enterprise-level data protection capabilities for the midmarket .
Executing the Roadmap
The Clipper Group Storage Analyst Diane MacAdam does not view the product announcements as significant in themselves. She told TechNewsWorld that the significance of the announcement is the execution of a clear roadmap for the line of modular storage.
"Are these good products, are they high capacity, high performing, cost-effective products? Absolutely, but I think there's more significance in that Sun is clear about where they are taking these products over the next year or two," MacAdam noted.
Indeed, Giroux hinted that technology enthusiasts should watch for additional developments in the near term.
Impressive Presentation
Analysts agreed that the products are impressive.
The StorageTek 6140 array is a Restriction of Hazardous Substances-compliant, 4 gigabits-per-second Fibre Channel array designed for both direct attached and SAN attached storage. The system features a fully redundant architecture with drive intermixing, eight 4 GB FC ports, a 4 GB cache, application-oriented management, switched drive connectivity, and a maximum capacity of 112 disk drives.
The StorageTek 6540 array is a RoHS-compliant, 4 GB/sec Fibre Channel array focused on large databases and high-performance computing. The system features a fully redundant architecture with drive intermixing, eight 4 GB FC ports, a 16 GB cache, application-oriented management, switched drive connectivity, and a maximum capacity of 224 disk drives.
"Storage managers are looking for solutions that scale in performance, capacity and capability," said John McArthur, group vice president and general manager at IDC. "The new Sun StorageTek modular storage family provides an open, standards-based system with the scale to support a wide variety of data and storage services for business critical applications."
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