Sun Microsystems Inc has earmarked its Thumper disk array as a future NAS and VTL platform, and said that it plans to make its Honeycomb CAS software open source.
Those were the only major development promised during a presentation given by storage chief David Yen during the company's analyst conference in San Francisco yesterday, under the heading "Storage Strategy for Growth."
Yen's presentation was shaped very similarly to previous pitches about Sun's plans to right its ailing storage ship. The former StorageTek's tape products took prime position at the head of a procession of product descriptions. Tape was followed by a run-through of Sun's OEM'ed disk arrays, and then a somewhat surprisingly heavy pitch for Sun's ZFS file system and SunFire powered X4500 server, which is codenamed Thumper.
Running the Solaris 10 OS and ZFS Thumper can "completely satisfy customer requirements," according to Yen.
Yen presumably did not mean that even high-end customers could make do with the SATA-only disk array. But Sun is expanding the roles for Thumper beyond the three niche applications for the box it named last summer, which were all about high data rates of data transfer HPC, data warehousing, and video serving.
The new roles for Sun will include being the platform for the Open System VTL software that Sun is continue OEM'ing from FalconStor Software Corp, following the axing last year of its homegrown VSM Open VTL efforts. Another role will be as a NAS box. Yen also talked about video serving, and data warehousing but here he was repeating what Sun said last summer.
Sun has already made server target, multi-pathing and other storage software open source, according to Yen. In the future it will do the same with other software such as its CIFS client. "Even Honeycomb will eventually get open sourced," Yen said.
Sun has talked about its Honeycomb CAS disk archive in the past, but has never officially launched the product. Yesterday, Yen handed the floor to a representative from Stanford University in California, who said the company is prototyping a Honeycomb installation that will eventually scale to hundreds of TB.
