Sun Preps For Server, Storage Launch

Sun Microsystems  plans to add to its server and storage lines at an event in New York today as part of the company’s quarterly news strategy.

The news comes in the face of fierce competition from IBM , HP  and Dell , all of whom have announced new computing infrastructure news of late.

New systems from Sun will include the Sun Netra T2000 rack server for telecommunications carriers and the Netra CP3060 ATCA blade server.

These are the first telco machines to leverage Sun’s UltraSPARC T1 processor, a 32-thread chip multi-threading architecture for speedy data delivery, said Warren Mootrey, senior director of volume SPARC systems at Sun.

For customers who aren’t ready or are unwilling to go to CoolThreads, Sun is also upgrading its volume Sun Fire systems.

The V215, V245 and V445 models provide 20 percent greater performance thanks to a new PCIE and PCIX I/O subsystem and a 1.5 gigahertz UltraSparc IIIi chip (up from 1.3 Ghz).

The systems vendor also said it is boosting its lowest-cost Sun Ultra 25 Workstation with a 300 percent performance bump.

Moreover, this machine, designed with developers in mind, will come pre-installed with Solaris 10 OS, Sun Studio, Sun Java Studio Creator and Sun Java Studio Enterprise.

While Sun is busy evangelizing about its own UltraSparc technologies, the company is hardly ignoring its relationship with AMD.

Sun executives will discuss plans for creating more Sun Fire servers that use AMD’s new Rev F. processors.

Shuttling data across powerful servers is great but hard to do without grabbing the data housed on storage devices.

David Kenyon, senior director of product management for data protection and archive at Sun, said Sun will debut an encrypted tape drive to better secure data stored on the drive.

The Sun StorageTek Crypto-Ready T10000 tape drive reduces the risk of exposing data to strangers, protecting computers both on site and off.

This drive, born from Sun and StorageTek technology, supports multiple operating systems, including Solaris OS, z/OS and Windows.

Sun will also trot out the StorageTek Crypto Key Management Station appliance, which allows customers to manage keys used to encrypt and decrypt data on the StorageTek T10000 tape drive.

Also on tap is the StorageTek VTL Plus virtual tape library machine, which provides virtual tape resources on a disk-based platform.

VTLs act like a tape library but offer disk quality, allowing customers to power thousands of tape cartridges to store data at a fast clip.