Continuing the momentum of their recent storage management software and virtualization announcements, Sun today announced the StorEdge 3300 Series, products that Sun says extend its promise of Complete Storage Solutions by delivering enterprise features into the workgroup. Available October 15th, 2002, the new storage arrays will bring added value to businesses with small to medium deployment requirements and help enable customers to do more with less. The first product in the new series will be the StorEdge 3310 SCSI array
According to Sun, the StorEdge 3300 Series strategically complements the Sun StorEdge product family, and is positioned underneath UNIX market leaders Sun StorEdge 9900, 6900 and 3900 Series arrays. They are designed and tested to take advantage of Sun’s entry level server line that includes the Sun LX50, Sun Fire V120, 280R, V480 and V880 servers. Sun says that these products are ideal for Sun customers who need compact, ultra-dense, ruggedized disk arrays to simplify storage planning and management.
“Sun has responded to its channel partners and customers who are demanding higher and higher levels of flexibility and availability from their storage systems,” said Mark Canepa, executive vice-president of Sun Microsystems Storage. “With this announcement, Sun is meeting customer requirements for doing more in less space, paying for what they need when they need it, and having the availability of enterprise features at entry level prices. We did this with servers and now we’re doing it with storage.”
Unlike the low-end storage boxes sold by others, Sun says that they help businesses to meet their small and medium application deployments by providing features such as hot swapping, scalability from gigabytes to terabytes, and durability to meet full NEBS level 3 compliance specifications. Due to the Sun StorEdge 3310 array’s single to dual RAID controllers and simple Web GUI, customers can quickly and cost effectively expand capacity and easily add Logical Unit Number (LUNs) and disk drives. According to Sun, for a customer to do this using a competing product, they would have to buy additional equipment, shut down their systems, and back up to tape before they can begin to add storage capacity.
Another feature that Sun says is unique to this category, the Sun StorEdge 3310 SCSI array includes remote management services software so that storage can be managed remotely. By delivering these feature sets in a workgroup system to customers, Sun says that the array is ideal for a broad range of customers including industrial, retail, life sciences, telco and government who seek simplicity and easier management.
“We are evaluating solutions from many leading vendors and Sun’s new StorEdge 3310 SCSI array is an exceptional product,” said Bruce Baumgarte, member, group technical staff, Texas Instruments, Inc. “It has outperformed other solutions and delivers the advanced features we require to ensure our storage is scalable, flexible and manageable. Sun understands our needs and has designed a very competitive solution.”
Recognizing the fact that many customer environments are heterogeneous, the new products support the Linux, NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, as well as the Solaris Operating Environment.