Sun achieves industry milestone

SANTA CLARA, USA: Sun Microsystems has announced a significant milestone in the IT industry: over 10,000 Sun StorageTek SL500 tape libraries have been shipped since 2004, demonstrating Sun's continued leadership in tape storage automation solutions.

Sun has also announced it has started shipping in mass production the scalable, energy-efficient Sun StorageTek SL3000 midrange modular library – which works with leading operating systems like the Solaris Operating System (OS) and offers double the storage density of similar products on the market.

An industry leader in tape automation and storage solutions, Sun's end-to-end archive and data protection portfolio provides customers an efficient and low-cost way to manage explosive data challenges in the data center. Sun's innovative storage solutions leverage an open approach with award-winning storage hardware platforms that offers significant economic benefits and investment protection over competing proprietary offerings.

“A true testament to the longevity and never-ending value of storage innovation, over 10,000 Sun StorageTek SL500 tape libraries have been chosen by our customers,” said Jon Benson, senior vice-president, Storage Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. “Coupling this landmark result with the recent shipment of the Sun StorageTek SL3000 modular library system – that offers up to double the density of the competition – demonstrates customer commitment to Sun's tape portfolio and Sun's mission to deliver best-of-breed tape solutions to the market.”

SL3000

The SL3000 changes the economic equation for companies that need to manage their IT bottom lines. The first midrange library with non-disruptive scalability of up to 3,000 slots, the Sun StorageTek SL3000 storage system delivers up to 50 percent reduction in space and up to 10x power savings over comparable libraries.

Based on the industry-leading Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library system, it is the first midrange library that allows a customer to upgrade up to 3,000 slots on-the-fly without downtime and the first solution to enable consolidation and leverage existing tape drive and media investments. It has the most flexible partitioning in the industry for easier and more efficient archive data management and its CenterLine technology improves time-to-data speed by up to 50 percent.