Sun Introduces New Tape Drive and Library

Sun Microsystems announced the latest additions to its growing storage portfolio, adding a scalable, energy-conscious midrange modular library and new multi-generational tape drive options that work heterogeneously with Solaris 10 and all leading operating systems. The new energy conscious Sun StorageTek SL3000 is the world’s first midrange library that delivers non-disruptive scalability, robotic upgrades without downtime and considerable savings on power consumption and space. Sun also introduced new fast-access tape drives, a complete hardware and software archive system and an upgraded encryption management solution.

The new eco-efficient SL3000 product line is the world’s first midrange library that delivers non-disruptive scalability, robotic upgrades without downtime and considerable savings on power consumption and space.

Wright State University, Elektrofilm and the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) each look to Sun for next-generation archive solutions that efficiently scale with the needs of their datacenters. The most heterogeneous storage vendor in the world, Sun is the first to offer “Any Cartridge, Any Slot” technology that allows customers to consolidate and leverage multi-vendor tape drives in Sun tape libraries.

New archive products from Sun include:

• StorageTek SL3000 Modular Library System – The first midrange library with non-disruptive scalability up to 3,000 slots, up to 50% reduction in space and up to 10x power savings over comparable libraries. Based on the industry-leading Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library system, it is the first midrange library that allows for upgrades on-the-fly without downtime, and the first mid-range solution to offer “Any cartridge, Any Slot” technology to enable consolidation and leverage existing investments. It has the most flexible partitioning in the industry for easier and more efficient data management, and its “Centerline” technology improves time to data (cartridge-to-drive performance) speed by up to 50%;
• Sun StorageTek T9840D Tape Drives – The only fast-access tape drive in the industry with an average data access time that is up to four times faster than other tape drives. The StorageTek T9840D is the first tape drive to use the same tape media as the previous 3 generations, which dramatically reduces tape media costs. Itis the first StorageTek T9840 tape drive with encryption to ensure that only those authorized have access to the data;
• Sun Crypto Key Management System (KMS) 2.0 – The first solution to enable a single centralized key encryption management for multi-vendor tape drives including the HP LTO, StorageTek T9840D, and the Sun StorageTek T10000. Designed to support up to 30x more devices than competing solutions, Sun is the first to commit to open sourcing a key management system that enables developers to modify the source code;
• Sun Customer Ready Content Infrastructure System (CIS) 3.0 – The first multi-tiered storage product/appliance in the market, and the most robust policy set, so data is stored at the right price point for the speed of data access customers need. It uses Sun’s Storage Archive Manager (SAM) software’s policy-based data placement across local and remote disk and tape. It comes complete with all the hardware and software with a single, integrated user interface. A 90TB Sun StorageTek CIS Archive Solution is 37% less expensive than a 90TB EMC Centera and even includes includes a server and HSM software. Sun CIS can archive 2PB of data at 46% less cost than a Centera equivalent, while consuming 1/3 of the power.

Sun Microsystems, Inc.