Sun Debuts Super Tape Drive

Sun Microsystems is celebrating its purchase
of StorageTek by unveiling a powerful new enterprise tape drive.

The Santa Clara, Calif., systems vendor announced the T10000 drive at FORUM
2005, the annual storage customer event led by StorageTek, in Washington
D.C. today.

The StorageTek purchase helped Sun broaden its storage portfolio line with its deep line of enterprise tape drives and information lifecycle management (ILM) products. ILM is a
strategy most storage infrastructure vendors offer to help customers manage data from the time of its creation until its destruction.

The T10000 enterprise tape drive is a good example of a product that
supports ILM initiatives in a tiered storage architecture: It provides
businesses with fast access to large volumes of information.

But the machine also eclipses StorageTek’s previous drives, boasting a 250
percent increase in density and 400 percent increase in throughput speeds
over the earlier StorageTek
T9940B drive.

Specifically, the device delivers a throughput rate of 120 megabytes per
second, and boasts a capacity of up to 500 gigabytes of uncompressed data,
or a terabyte of compressed data, on a single cartridge. Future versions of
the T10000 will store up to one terabyte uncompressed on a single cartridge.

The T10000 also supports Fibre Channel and FICON dual-port connectivity, and
features encryption at the drive-level, ensuring that information is
protected against unauthorized access from the time data is captured.

Data security is essential at a time when compliance regulations are
demanding files be unchanged. That’s why the T10000 also uses the VolSafe
write once read many (WORM) media technology and new SafeGuide guiding
system to assure the integrity of information. Both technologies were forged
in StorageTek.

CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and holder of 1 percent of the world’s digital data, is currently testing the T10000 as a possible solution to meet its need for high performance and data availability.

The T10000 is the first significant product to be launched from Sun’s newly
formed Data Management Group, led by Sun Executive Vice President Mark
Canepa.

In related news, Sun today expanded the Java Availability Suite within its
Java Enterprise System (Java ES), offering the Cluster Geographic Edition as
a multi-site disaster recovery and clustering and availability software
platform.

Cluster Geographic Edition is designed to help customers achieve and
maintain data center availability across unlimited distances during planned
maintenance, or and unplanned event such as a network failure or natural
disaster.

UBS Investment Bank’s IT uses Sun clusters to move from mainframes to high
availability clusters as it targets new customer segments all over the
world.