SYSTEMS

Sun Emerges from StorageTek Acquisition to Unveil Four-Step Data Management Approach; Rolls Out New NAS and Virtual Tape Systems, Enterprise Storage Management Software and Breakthrough Information Management Maturity Model; Highlights Project Honeycomb as Part of New Product Pipeline -- Sun Microsystems today flipped the storage market on its side with its new approach to data management. Sun's new comprehensive four-step data management strategy addresses identity management, virtualization, security and open and easily integratable systems and software for greater business value. Sun now offers one of the market's most complete portfolios of enterprise storage offerings for managing data from creation to deletion. The merged product lines and services, combined with today's new offerings, put Sun in the position to help customers like HBO, Hewitt Associates, Paramount, Fox Television Stations and Wake Forest Baptist University manage the massive growth of data and the evolving ways to use it in the Participation Age of Web 2.0. Sun today announced several key products and services at its Network Computing launch event to showcase its strategy and product portfolio for managing data, including the new Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance, new versions of the Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) and award-winning Sun StorageTek Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM) offerings, new Sun Services for Managed Operations for Storage, new patent-pending Information Management Maturity Model workshops to help customers drive smarter data infrastructures, and several enhancements to the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) for easier management, access and retrieval of data. "If Web 1.0 was all about computing, then Web 2.0 is also about data," said Mark Canepa, executive vice president, Data Management Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "More than ever, data is the lifeblood for business growth in the enterprise. Traditional approaches to storage are not enough for enterprise customers to compete. Sun is setting a course to change the way customers and the industry look at data, from building-in identity management and security to enabling a world in which self-aware applications can discover data wherever it is in its lifecycle." With FY06Q3 results showing 92 percent year-over-year growth in data management revenues and double-digit revenue growth in mid- and high-end storage systems, Sun and StorageTek's merged product portfolios and sales teams are resonating with customers of all sizes. And with 37 percent of the world's data now stored on systems from Sun, according to an April 2006 Freeman Report, Sun is poised to further address the growing worldwide storage market. "As the storage hardware market continues to grow, storage management is one of the fastest-growing areas of storage service with compound annual growth of over nine percent," said Adam Couture, Gartner Principal Analyst. "While compliance, data security and other high profile factors have an impact on storage management growth, the biggest single factor is businesses trying to cope with the growing complexity of their storage environments." "Data is the heartbeat of our business model and is critical to providing the highest quality care to our patients," said Bob Massengill, Manager of Technical Services, Wake Forest Baptist University Medical Center. "It's absolutely critical that we make our data easily searchable, accessible and retrievable. Clinicians, health insurance providers and patients need to have readily available access to our information and full trust that our data is secure. Our information must be protected throughout its lifecycle -- all of the time, no matter where it is stored. Sun's data management expertise, complete portfolio of storage and systems products and identity management leadership provided us with the end-to-end, secure and easy to manage storage environment our business operations require." SUN'S STRATEGY FOCUSES ON DATA By addressing the changing nature of data, Sun looks to revolutionize the model and help businesses move from simply storing information to making their data access and management easy and intelligent. Sun's new strategy capitalizes on its powerful identity management software portfolio and its complete, integrated network computing platform. The platform is based on the Solaris 10 OS and leverages its full capabilities to work in heterogeneous environments, including mainframes. As enterprises continue to contend with myriad business and technical issues from data center complexity to the spiraling cost of data management to compliance, Sun will continue to invest in data management security, software, heterogeneous disk and tape, and other new technologies like Project Honeycomb, which represent a new category of products that will change the way applications search for, access and retrieve data. Sun's simple, secure, identity-enabled solutions help customers manage data and unlock its value with a unique, four-part approach: - Identity Built In -- Sun offers one of the most complete, secure and identity-based management solutions to safeguard and simplify data as it is migrated to different storage resources over its lifecycle. Via Sun Java System Identity Manager software, Sun provides the industry's first complete user provisioning and identity data synchronization solution to help manage identity profiles and permissions throughout the entire identity lifecycle, helping to reduce storage costs, strengthening compliance and making data more valuable as it can be made available securely to more users. Sun Java System Access Manager is also integrated into the Sun StorageTek Enterprise Storage Manager portfolio to ease access and improve data integrity. - Virtualization Built In -- From primary storage to archival and protection, virtualization enables customers to harness legacy and new data as a shared resource across heterogeneous environments. Sun's virtualization solutions enable simplification of backup and recovery processes, faster recovery and recall times, better performance and increased reliability. - Security Embedded -- At Sun, security is designed into the entire system, including identity management and device-level encryption, improving data access and trust. Sun's systems approach secures data from creation at the application level, on the network and ultimately in archives. - Integrated Data Management Platform -- Powered by the Solaris 10 OS, Sun enables customers to future-proof their data with a single, common platform that delivers policy models and automation to help promote trust and provide availability, access and value. NEW TODAY -- SUN EXPANDS PORTFOLIO OF INTELLIGENT DATA MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS AND SERVICES Sun announced today a range of products and solutions in support of its data management strategy, including the Information Management Maturity Model workshop, the Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance and new versions of the Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager system. Sun also previewed new technologies that will create new categories of storage products. "We are really excited about the activity at Sun," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "One of the most compelling aspects of this activity is its new Project Honeycomb storage solution. There is still a wide gap between the interrelationship of applications and storage. We believe a new category is being driven by Sun's Project Honeycomb that ESG is calling application-aware storage, and we feel it will have far reaching implications." Sun's new product announcements included: - Sun's patent-pending Information Management Maturity Model workshop aims to help customers achieve the long-term benefits from smart Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies. In a half-day session, Sun will help enterprises discover where their organization falls within the model, compare that ranking to industry benchmarks and the competition, and identify the strengths and weakness of their ILM strategies, setting the stage for improvement and future implementations and enhancements moving forward. - The Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance is an enhanced Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution based on the AMD Opteron processor. The new solution builds on the success of the Sun StorEdge 5000 NAS Appliance family to deliver price/performance that outpaces comparable solutions from competing NAS providers by up to 50 percent. Sun is also expanding its popular "Try-and-Buy Program" to include storage products. The program enables customers and approved reseller partners of all sizes to evaluate and test the Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance at no charge for 60 days, with the option to purchase the system at the end. - The Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) system is the market-leading virtual tape solution for mainframe environments, providing an intelligently managed disk buffer between the mainframe and tape storage systems. Designed to improve performance and capacity to help lower total cost of ownership for tape processing, Sun today announced VSM 5 and VSM 4e to maximize tape cartridge utilization, reduce datacenter floor space requirements and optimize batch processing for heterogeneous environments. - Also announced today is the integration of identity management capabilities with Sun's award-winning StorageTek Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM) software, which further helps IT organizations easily and quickly discover, visualize, monitor, report and charge-back on, as well as provision complex multi-vendor storage networks from a single Web-based enterprise platform. - Sun announced new Managed Operations for Storage services designed to help lower storage management staffing costs, decrease storage resource management software licensing and integration costs, improve database and transaction performance through proactive reporting, drive on-time provisioning and storage allocation under service level agreements, and decrease the risk of data loss. - Sun also unveiled a new file system that ensures the highest levels of data integrity to help companies manage today's ever-increasing amount of data, while reducing the associated costs. Solaris ZFS 1.0 will be available in June as part of the next commercial release of the Solaris 10 OS, the most advanced operating system on the planet. In addition, the latest release, Solaris 10 6/06, will also provide advanced data management with a fully-supported PostgreSQL open source database, making the Solaris 10 OS one of the premiere platforms for hosting high performance, mission critical database solutions. - Project Honeycomb: Sun will also preview upcoming breakthrough technologies that create an entirely new product category in the storage and systems space. Project Honeycomb will change the way applications search for, access and retrieve data.