NTAP may be reacting to the news from SUNW....
Wednesday June 14, 1:17 pm Eastern Time
Company Press Release
SOURCE: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems Introduces Sun StorEdge(TM) T3 Arrays, the Industry's Most Scalable Network Storage Solution
Sun's Flexible Network-Centric Storage System to Support Multi-Vendor Host Environments Including Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Windows NT, and Linux/Intel
SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) today introduced the Sun StorEdge(TM) T3 family of network storage arrays. The product line delivers the industry's most scalable high- availability storage solutions for entry-level workgroup to high-end enterprise requirements and everything in between. The Sun StorEdge T3 array's ability to scale capacity, performance, and availability makes it an ideal solution for customers in the dot-com environment. Delivering on Sun's open systems-based managed networks strategy, the product line will support multi- vendor host environments including Sun Solaris(TM) and current versions of HP- UX, IBM AIX, Windows NT, Windows 2000 NT, and Linux/Intel.
``The exploding data requirements of the Net economy have brought about a new storage paradigm that requires dynamic, intelligent, network-based storage services for heterogeneous environments,'' said Denise Shiffman, vice president of marketing for Sun Network Storage. ``Customers need to be able to scale capacity, performance and availability at the same time, and they need to be able to do it quickly and cost-effectively. Sun is the first to provide this three-dimensional scalability in a highly flexible product family designed for the network that can be affordably deployed at the workgroup level, yet can achieve massive scale to address high-end enterprise requirements as well.''
Sun StorEdge T3 Array Delivers High Availability and Performance in a Flexible Network-Centric Architecture
Designed for the requirements of the Net economy, the Sun StorEdge T3 array is the ideal building block for high-performance, highly available storage networks. The system combines advanced hardware RAID features with industry standard Fibre Channel technology in a flexible package that allows customers to easily grow and adapt storage to changing IT requirements. The advanced architecture of the Sun StorEdge T3 array meets the demands of a wide range of applications but is particularly well suited for database, NFS, web serving, and e-mail, as well as variety of workloads. The system enables customers to address expanding storage requirements, quick deployment of new applications, improved response to web serving and increasing performance demands.
Realizing that in today's business, competition is just a click away, Sun has designed the Sun StorEdge T3 array for continuous availability with no single point of failure and features such asredundant hot-swap components, dual paths to the host and mirrored cache. In the event of a component failure, the system is easily serviceable. Components can be accessed and swapped out without interrupting data availability.
Among the performance strengths of the Sun StorEdge T3 array are the system's redundant 100 MB per second Fibre Channel arbitrated loop (FC-AL) host interface and dual 100 MB per second back-end FC-AL drive loops, which deliver extremely high data throughput and bandwidth. In addition, the system speeds performance by using an end-to-end Fibre Channel hardware RAID controller with an optimized mirrored cache. The cache reduces mechanical disk seek and latency periods, optimizing physical disk I/O access patterns and reducing the number of drive accesses, which are the bottlenecks in most RAID storage systems.
The Sun StorEdge T3 array in combination with a Sun Enterprise(TM) 10000 server (also known as Starfire(TM)), recently achieved record performance in a SAP R/3 SD Benchmark, reinforcing Sun's position as the world's fastest ERP platform. The Sun configuration handled over 5.8 million dialog steps per hour and supported more than 19,360 simultaneous users when put to test on the three-tier SAP R/3 standard sales and distribution benchmark. For more information, see today's Sun press release on the benchmark.
Sun StorEdge T3 Array Delivers Three-Dimensional Scalability and Easy Manageability
The Sun StorEdge T3 array addresses the needs of the Net economy by delivering the best overall scalability available in the market. The system's tremendous capacity expansion range of 162 gigabytes (GB) to 88 terabytes (TB) is only part of the story. The system scales capacity, performance and availability in a linear and predictable fashion. As capacity increases, performance increases by a predictable amount, and availability scales as additional data paths and redundancy are added. This provides for higher performance as capacity grows and delivers a measure of performance and availability that customers can count on. They don't have to worry about performance degrading or staying flat or about jeopardizing data availability as their business grows. Performance does not scale this way in competitive systems, so customers are forced to add a second storage enclosure just to increase performance even if additional capacity is not needed.
In addition to seamless scalability, the Sun StorEdge T3 array offers access to critical services such as remote management, diagnostics, and monitoring. The array includes Sun StorEdge Component Manager, a next generation storage management tool for on premise, easy management of distributed networks. From a single interface in the data center customers can centrally and remotely configure, monitor, diagnose, and control Sun StorEdge T3 arrays as well as other Sun storage systems on their network. There is no need for customers to purchase new management software as they add storage. Also available to Sun StorEdge T3 array customers is Sun(SM) Remote Services (SRS) 2.0, an event monitoring and management service offered by Sun to help improve system and storage availability by proactively identifying potential issues and providing resolution before the customer's environment is affected.
Sun's Capacity On Demand Leasing Program Eases the Financial Impact of Explosive Growth
Sun StorEdge T3 array customers will be able to take advantage of Sun's new Capacity on Demand leasing program. The program features a lease option that eases the financial impact of explosive growth with a starting price as low as $.01 per megabyte (MB) in the first year for certain configurations larger than one TB. The payment plan increases to $.04 to $.09 per MB depending on configuration in the second and third year providing the customer easy and predictable budgeting.
Plans for Sun Storage T3 Array Deployment Already Underway
Sun customers and the network storage community are enthusiastic about the arrival of the Sun StorEdge T3 array, which will bring linear scalability, high bandwidth, continuous availability and ease-of-use to their IT infrastructure while protecting the safety of business-critical data. Many application and database platforms are poised to utilize the system as a fundamental building block for development and IT infrastructure.
``The Oracle Internet Platform and the Oracle E-Business Suite are the most available, scalable, reliable and secure way to run an e-business,'' said Juan Jones, vice president, System Platforms Division, Oracle Corporation. ``The new Sun StorEdge T3 array, with its intelligent array architecture, high performance, modularity, and ease of management complements Oracle's e- business software as the foundation of the networked data center.''
``As the data volume and the number of users and interactions grow at BlueLight.com, obviously the storage requirement is going to increase rapidly,'' said Ghufran Ahmed, vice president of engineering for BlueLight.com, the online retail branch of the Kmart Corporation. ``We need to be able to just plug disk drive modules into our architecture and be able to seamlessly scale without any downtime or interruption to our existing infrastructure whatsoever. The Sun StorEdge T3 array, with its architecture and availability features, will enable us to do that extremely effectively.''
Availability, Pricing and Support
The Sun StorEdge T3 arrays for the workgroup and the enterprise are targeted for availability to U.S. and international customers beginning July 11, 2000. List pricing for a 162 GB Sun StorEdge T3 array for the workgroup starts at $32,500. The Sun StorEdge T3 array for the enterprise is list priced at $91,450 for a 327 GB configuration, while a 2.6 TB configuration is list priced at $465,900. Pricing and availability are subject to change without notice.
The Sun StorEdge T3 array for the workgroup is backed by a Sun two-year warranty. The first year includes a second day onsite, and the second year includes a 15 day return to factory. SunSpectrum(SM) support is available for an additional charge. The Sun StorEdge T3 array for the enterprise comes with two year support based on SunSpectrum(SM) Gold, which includes 7x24 telephone support, four-hour on-site response time, remote system diagnostics through Sun Remote Services (SRS) 2.0, ArrayStart installation, and software enhancements and maintenance releases.
To help customers realize the full potential of the Sun StorEdge T3 array, Sun Professional Services offers architecture and implementation consulting services. Sun consultants can help customers assess, architect, design and implement this advanced product in their network storage solutions.
During the coming months, the Sun StorEdge T3 array will be among Sun storage systems and management software introducing support for Jiro(TM) technology. Based on the Java(TM) 2 platform, Jiro technology increases integration among storage systems, management software and network devices, and is seen as an important enabler of next generation storage networks.
About Sun Network Storage
Sun Network Storage was formed by Sun Microsystems in July 1998, and is a recognized multi-billion dollar industry leader in the UNIX© and open systems storage market. Sun is changing the rules in network storage by delivering software and hardware written to an open network architecture. Sun's commitment to standards enables timely availability of new technology, investment protection for existing technology, and a thriving partner community. The comprehensive Sun StorEdge family of products enables customers to match storage to the application while providing scalable capacity and performance in a ``pay-as-you-grow'' architecture.
Sun offers customers a complete family of network storage systems and storage management software. The Sun StorEdge line of disk storage, tape backup, management software and data services address workgroup to enterprise requirements with solutions for server-attached storage, network-attached storage, consolidated storage networks and storage area networks. The products offer exceptional reliability, availability, scalability, manageability and performance.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- ``The Network Is The Computer(TM)'' -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc., to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to dot-com their businesses. With $14.2 billion in annual revenues, Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at sun.com.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun StorEdge, Sun Enterprise, Starfire, SunSpectrum, Java, Jiro and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc., in the United States and other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company Ltd.
SOURCE: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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