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After numerous acquisitions -- the biggest of which being that of StorageTek -- Sun Microsystems's product portfolio is now complete. The company recently strengthened its data management strategy with new Sun managed operations for storage.
John Anderson, APAC Business Development Manager, Data Management Group, Sun Microsystems and Richard Kallemeyer, Senior Marketing Manager, Network Storage Solutions Group Sun Microsystems, elaborate on Sun’s new initiatives as well as its plans on the storage front.
Could you give an update on the integration between Sun and StorageTek?
We are integrating very well and taking advantage of each other’s technologies. We recently announced several key products and services. These include the new Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance, new versions of the Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) and Sun StorageTek Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM) offerings.
Thirty-six per cent of the world’s electronic data is now stored on Sun, thanks to StorageTek. StorageTek has also been working over the years on backup, data migration and had coined the term information lifecycle management (ILM). Now we are investing in merging Sun servers as the engine with Sun software called SAM that provides data classification, centralized meta-data management, policy based data placement, protection, migration, long-term retention, and recovery.
Earlier, Sun storage portfolio was not well branded, but StorageTek’s was. From now on all product offerings relating to storage from Sun will be branded as 'Sun StorageTek'. Before the acquisition, we sold about 95 per cent of our storage on Sun servers. With StorageTek acquisition, we can now support and drive storage on non-Sun platforms as well.
Sun was doing any maintenance earlier. After the acquisition, we have started providing services as well because of StorageTek’s background of being a service organization. Another tool from StorageTek has been the Back up manager. This is an end to end solution taking care of right from the back up server to the media and everything in between and Sun is also moving towards back up management, where customers don’t own the back, we own the backup and set up service level agreements (SLAs).
What is Sun (SM) Managed Operations for storage?
We have been managing customers operations before and now have just formalized the process.
Sun Managed Operations for Storage is a new management service that strengthens Sun's ability to provide customer’s flexibility and choice in their management of heterogeneous disk and tape storage. This announcement is part of Sun's new comprehensive four-step data management strategy, which addresses identity management, virtualization, security and open and easily integratable systems and software for greater business value.
One of the key drivers of this is StorageTek’s acquisition of dotcom company Storability several years ago. The idea was that storage was a utility and costs so much per megabyte per month. Storability had developed a lot of unique management tools for accessing storage. Sun has already converted these tools into business analytics. With the help of these tools a CXO can see how much storage is being used, how much is the cost, etc. Storability had also done storage outsource management for a US company. We have now developed the skills to do that.
Can you elaborate on your data management strategy?
Our four-step data management strategy is based on four letters – VAST, which stand for Value, Asset, Simplicity and Trust. It is basically making sure that customers get value for their storage so that they can use it effectively and fully utilize their assets.
Simplicity means making it easy for the users. Storage is way too hard still. SCSI is probably 30 years old and all the new fiber channel storage is still embedded in old SCSI protocol. So we are almost at a stage where we have to think about a new way of looking at storage. Infact some of the platforms that our clients are putting together around intelliSTOR, an enterprise report management solution, will make it easier for users to handle things like migration, putting it on the most cost effective medium, classifying data, moving the data automatically, etc.
Our whole idea of trust is that we are now bringing Sun’s identity management experience into storage. We are trying to drive Sun’s identity management pieces into storage. StorageTek has done some superb work and our T10000 tape drives will actually give encryption towards the end of this year.
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