Sun Ships 10,000th StorageTek SL500 Tape Library

Sun Microsystems announced a significant milestone in the IT industry: over 10,000 Sun StorageTek SL500 tape libraries have been shipped since 2004, demonstrating Sun’s continued leadership in tape storage automation solutions. Sun also announced it has started shipping in mass production the scalable, energy-efficient Sun StorageTek SL3000 midrange modular library – which works with leading operating systems like the Solaris Operating System (OS) and offers double the storage density of similar products on the market.

An industry leader in tape automation and storage solutions, Sun’s end-to-end archive and data protection portfolio provides customers an efficient and low-cost way to manage explosive data challenges in the datacenter. Sun’s innovative storage solutions leverage an open approach with award-winning storage hardware platforms that offers significant economic benefits and investment protection over competing proprietary offerings.

"A true testament to the longevity and never-ending value of storage innovation, over 10,000 Sun StorageTek SL500 tape libraries have been chosen by our customers," said Jon Benson, senior vice-president, Storage Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Coupling this landmark result with the recent shipment of the Sun StorageTek SL3000 modular library system – that offers up to double the density of the competition – demonstrates customer commitment to Sun’s tape portfolio and Sun’s mission to deliver best-of-breed tape solutions to the market."

Sun StorageTek SL3000 Modular Library System Ships
Rounding out Sun’s extensive portfolio of innovative, scalable and open archive and data protection solutions, the SL3000 changes the economic equation for companies that need to manage their IT bottom lines. The first midrange library with non-disruptive scalability of up to 3,000 slots, the Sun StorageTek SL3000 storage system delivers 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 a customer to upgrade up to 3,000 slots on-the-fly without downtime and the first solution to enable consolidation and leverage existing tape drive and media investments. It has the most flexible partitioning in the industry for easier and more efficient archive data management and its CenterLine technology improves time-to-data speed by up to 50%.

Sun Customers, Partners Save Space, Power with Eco-Efficient Tape Solutions
The largest supermarket chain in India, Spencer’s Retail has over 400 retail stores in 65 cities and 3.5 million customers a month. The company expanded its Sun IT infrastructure as it continues aggressive growth and plans to open 1500 more outlets by March 2010. Spencer’s Retail has selected Sun StorageTek disk and tape storage, Sun Fire servers running UltraSPARC processors and the Solaris 10 Operating System with Sun Cluster Software to build its ERP infrastructure. By selecting Sun, Spencers Retail has ensured zero software migration cost and smoothest business continuity. Moreover, energy efficient & eco-responsible servers from Sun have helped Spencer’s Retail to reduce its datacenter footprint and to lower the operational cost of the datacenter.

Larsen & Toubro Limited (L&T) is another Sun StorageTek SL500 library customer that has saved significant time and money.

Sun reseller partner NET Source specialized in architecting, developing and deploying completed data solutions. The company tackles some of the toughest data challenges that require varied degrees of integration across heterogeneous environments. NET Source, Inc. CEO Joe Fannin added, "The Sun StorageTek SL500, from Sun Microsystems, leverages Sun StorageTek’s experience in the enterprise tape market, and has been one of the most popular products in our storage portfolio, Its industry leading design, scalability and reliability make it a superior offering in the SMB space."

Sun ‘Open’ for Archive Storage Business
Sun is the only vendor with an open approach to archiving that allows customers to easily deploy Sun archive components into their existing environment and to leverage Sun open source community innovations, expertise and support. Sun storage hardware and software is heterogeneous and works with all major operating systems including Solaris 10 OS.