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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: professor who wrote (12553)	12/12/1998 10:17:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 64865

SUNW to try and hold EMC off.......Over on the SAN/FC threads we've been wondering if SUNW was going to be an FC no show. Perhaps now they will get the ball rolling. The Q's I have are is SUNW just a little too late. Will they need some FC harware( hubs and switches) soon? Thanks in advance. techweb.com December 14, 1998, Issue: 713 Section: Top Of The Week Sun's SAN Initiative -- Storex Platform Could Let Storage Area Network Products Interoperate Martin J. Garvey Sun Microsystems wants to deliver the glue that will bind together devices in storage area networks. The company this week will reveal plans for Project StoreX, a development platform that could provide an open way for servers, storage systems, switches, hubs, and software from different manufacturers to work with one another in a SAN framework. The goal of these Fibre Channel storage infrastructures, built upon pools of storage and servers, is to make any data available to any user, eliminating point-to-point connections. Sun says StoreX provides a more efficient option for moving and copying data, and establishing security among heterogeneous devices, than does the alternative, which is to have each SAN vendor deliver its own solution. Sun is seeking widespread support; so far, it has signed on a few leading players, including Seagate Technology and StorageTek. Some analysts compare StoreX, based on Java 2, formerly JDK 1.2, to products like Novell NetWare. "PCs connected without a network operating system don't mean anything," says Jon Oltsik, a Forrester Research analyst. "Storage services must be available at the network, not the device, level." StoreX, says Oltsik, can more easily provide that capability. Customers like the idea of having a storage interoperability standard. "StoreX can level the storage playing field," says Marc Hansen, VP of systems architecture for J. Crew, the New York apparel manufacturer. It will help him easily replace storage systems from one vendor with another's product, or mix disparate systems in a SAN. Oltsik, however, doesn't expect leading storage vendor EMC Corp. to sign up for StoreX, and Compaq, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard also aren't early supporters. These major storage companies, says Oltsik, don't want to open up their software intelligence to others. "EMC will try to ramrod the SAN market with its own [proprietary] implementation," says Oltsik. "If StoreX comes off, it's EMC's worst nightmare." But that's not certain to happen: He says Sun has only six months to get serious support for the platform.