Sun plans ID-smart storage kit

New executive Jonathan Schwartz promises deeper move into storage

Sun Microsystems is moving deeper into storage under its new chief executive.

The company, now under the leadership of Jonathan Schwartz after Scott McNealy stood down as chief executive last month, has announced a series of new products around technologies it acquired from StorageTek last year.

These products include the new 5320 NAS appliance, storage management and virtualisation software, and services. The firm also said it plans to build identity management and security into storage systems and will eventually roll out its Honeycomb project to make storage “application-aware”, so that data can be more easily discovered and stored. However, Honeycomb is more likely to appear in 2007 rather than this year.

Scott McNealy, now chairman of Sun, said that more intelligent storage is becoming intrinsic to what he called the “participation age”.

“You will have conditional access to everything from wherever you are, wireless, wireline, whatever geography you are in, at whatever time of day,” McNealy said. “That’s the challenge… to make sure that we can provide our communities with the information they need, the data access they need, with privacy, security, authentication, identity. We have to have not only single sign-on but in many cases, single sign-off when [users are] no longer authorised to have access to the data.”

Sun also said that a new version of Solaris 10 incorporating Sun’s 128bit Zettabyte File System (ZFS) will be available in June. ZFS is intended as a highly-scalable file system with self-healing and high-availability capabilities. The Solaris release will also incorporate a full copy of the PostgreSQL open-source database for the first time.