Sun Microsystems today introduced its T10000 enterprise tape drive at the annual storage customer event, FORUM 2005. As part of the focus on its data management capabilities, the company also unveiled its market leading data storage portfolio that has been created as a result of the recently closed StorageTek acquisition. More than 1,000 Sun customers, partners, media and industry analysts are gathering in Washington D.C. to discuss the latest advances in storage technology as well as the issues that are front and center with data center, storage and IT managers. This year's event marks the 17th annual FORUM customer conference where attendees can interact with peers and storage industry experts to address issues related to improving storage productivity, making data protection simple, predictable and reliable, and managing and archiving information to comply with regulations and laws mandating data retention. "FORUM represents the coming together of two of the information technology industry's most trusted, well established brands: Sun and StorageTek," said Mark Canepa, Executive Vice President of Sun's newly formed Data Management Group. "The unprecedented blending of these industry leaders with a common vision, a history of innovation, and data center expertise will assure that our customers enjoy a broad solution portfolio and unrivaled focus on customer service and long-term partnerships to reduce the cost and complexity associated with storage management." Sun is distinguished as the first company with an end-to-end approach to automate data storage and retrieval across the tiered storage hierarchy, and the first to bring ILM to the systems level to balance the cost of storing and managing information with the changing value of that information over time. Introducing the T10000 Enterprise Tape Drive At FORUM today, Sun introduced the T10000 enterprise tape drive which extends the value and performance delivered via StorageTek's earlier T-Series drives to provide businesses with fast access to large volumes of information at a very attractive price per gigabyte. Delivering the industry's highest native tape drive throughput rate (120 megabytes/second), capacity of up to 500 gigabytes uncompressed - or a terabyte of compressed data on a single cartridge - and Fibre Channel and FICON dual-port connectivity, the T10000 delivers a 250% increase in density and 400% increase in throughput speeds over the earlier StorageTek T9940B drive. Future generations of the T10000 will feature expanded capacity up to one terabyte uncompressed on a single cartridge. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is currently testing the T10000. As the world's largest particle physics laboratory, CERN relies on high performance and data availability to improve cost management and productivity. CERN houses one percent of the entire world's digital data collection, and by 2007, intends to collect fifteen petabytes of data per year. "We are currently in the midst of a 10-year project that will produce huge volumes of data that needs to be captured and made available for processing immediately," said Charles Curran, storage consultant, CERN. "The data that is collected in these experiments will probably never appear again, so we need a high performance, reliable tape drive to ensure we don't miss anything. By more than doubling the storage capacity over Sun's prior tape drives, the new T10000 will enable us to use significantly less tape library space to do more work and helps mitigate risk and ensure near 24x7 drive operation." "Underscored by the unveiling of the T10000 today at FORUM, Sun remains committed to its product roadmap across a diversity of environments and key product families, spanning tape, disk, networking and software solutions," continued Canepa. "In this way, customers gain a greater understanding of where we are going as a company, and the confidence of knowing that our top priority is to maximize the value of their investments in StorageTek and Sun technologies." Eyes on the Future Managing data both efficiently and securely is one of the greatest challenges facing organizations today. Sun understands that a comprehensive information lifecycle management strategy includes Planning, Building and Managing - and most of all - Securing customers' computing environments to minimize risk. Securing access to sensitive information and mitigating risk is essential to helping customers protect their businesses and comply with industry regulations, corporate governance, and other legal requirements. In the months ahead, the advanced Solaris User and Process Rights Management software capabilities offered with Solaris will come together with Sun's advanced identity management solutions and information lifecycle management strategy to help secure data and automate its movement across the entire enterprise. From a risk perspective, one of the most significant value propositions that identity management provides is in-depth and immediate knowledge of 'who' has access to 'what' company information. Moving forward, Sun will provide customers with flexibility and choice in storage and data management offerings for heterogeneous environments, coupled with robust identity management and security solutions, drawing upon the company's long history of innovation and data center expertise. "Business and IT are rapidly converging, and we are challenged to reduce complexity, increase efficiency, improve accessibility to information and mitigate risk all at the same time," said Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "This collaboration between Sun and StorageTek brings it all together from one company - a broad, open product portfolio, industry-leading storage and systems expertise, a vast partner network, and world-class service and support. Few companies are better positioned, or have a greater wealth of resources, to meet the pressing business needs that customers face today."