Sun Adds De-Dup to VTL Portfolio

Sun Microsystems announced a significant update to its growing
storage and virtual tape library (VTL) product portfolio that includes
the addition of powerful, low-cost data de-duplication technologies.
Sun has seen a staggering 300% year-over growth rate of its open
systems VTL products since introduction in March, 2007 and is quickly
gaining share in the fastest growing market segment in the storage
industry. Enterprise datacenter customers and channel partners have
been impressed with how Sun’s highly scalable, eco-efficient VTL
solutions can help securely back-up growing data volumes and lower
total cost of ownership.

This announcement furthers Sun’s effort to deliver better economics
for customers through open platforms that leverage open source storage
communities. New Sun StorageTek VTL Plus,
expanded capacities of the Sun StorageTek VTL Value line and the
addition of data de-duplication offerings in new Sun StorageTek VTL
Prime further demonstrate Sun’s innovative approach to virtual storage
that is based upon the integration of open platforms like the Solaris Operating System (OS), innovative tape and disk storage technologies and the world’s most reliable servers.

Enterprise data is growing exponentially and today’s businesses need a
way to dramatically reduce cost and, at the same time, back-up data in
an ever-shrinking window and meet service-level agreements. What’s
more, many businesses’ enterprise data is highly dispersed: 50 to 60%
of all data resides in remote offices that do not have the staff to
back-up data properly or, in many instances, not at all. Data
de-duplication lowers overall cost of physical storage by storing only
the unique data, as just one copy of the data is retained.

"Our customers need to store and back-up increasing amounts of data
longer with faster recovery periods. The success of our VTL solutions
in the market is proof that Sun delivers unmatched value through the
combination of industry-leading platforms and high performance storage
and compute systems," said David Kenyon, vice-president, product
marketing and business operations, Storage Group, Sun Microsystems,
Inc. "We’ll continue to deliver innovative storage solutions that
leverage open platforms to drive breakthrough economics for our
customer businesses."

Partners have been instrumental to the fast customer adoption of the
Sun StorageTek VTL family. Channel partners like Dewpoint and others
have seen fast customer adoption for end-to-end, highly scalable Sun
VTL solutions that leverage Solaris OS and other common software
platforms for easy-integration.

"We really like the Sun VTL family of products" said Tony McGary,
Storage Practice Lead for Dewpoint, a Sun Executive Partner. "The new
data de-duplication features make the effectiveness and value even
better. With VTL Value and VTL Plus, we can offer something that fits
all our customers’ needs-from the small office to the large enterprise.
Because all versions run on the same software platform, it is easy for
our customers to understand."

Common Platform Extends Sun VTL Portfolio
Sun has built a common platform for the expansion of its virtual
tape storage offerings, which has seen exponential growth in customer
adoption since introduction a year ago. This common platform has
yielded the latest generation of Sun StorageTek VTL Plus that delivers
double the performance and tighter integration with backup applications
and the expansion of Sun StorageTek VTL Value capacity to 12, 24, 36
and 48 terabytes.

In addition, as the first data de-duplication solution from Sun, Sun
StorageTek VTL Prime can be used as a stand alone VTL or may be
implemented with Sun StorageTek VTL Plus to provide a cost-effective,
tiered data protection architecture. This new solution is a simple,
cost effective way to synchronize and consolidate the backup process
for remote-office and large enterprise environments. Sun StorageTek VTL
Prime replicates only the unique data to significantly reduce the
bandwidth requirements and enable cost effective disaster recovery and
business continuity. This new solution helps customers to be more
Eco-friendly, lower TCO and shrink storage requirements through the use
of virtualization technologies.

"The VTL market is one of the fastest growing segments in the industry
today, and customers need highly scalable and innovative solutions that
can easily fit into their existing backup processes and
infrastructure," said Bernie Wu, vice-president of business
development, FalconStor. "The new Sun StorageTek VTL Prime is yet
another example of how the Sun-FalconStor strategic partnership will
provide customers an enterprise class, well-integrated data protection
and deduplication solution."

Pricing and Availability
Early access units of the Sun Storage VTL Prime are available this month and starts at a list price of less than US$40K.
 

Sun Microsystems Inc.