Sun Storage: the future is bright, the future’s Purple

2000-06-15

One of the big surprises about Sun’s recent storage announcement was that it was now making more money out of sales of storage devices, than of servers. Now that’s food for thought. Clearly, this is the factor that has spurred it on to go head to head with companies more traditionally associated with the pure storage market, notably Compaq, HDS and EMC. Sun have announced a new storage strategy and a new product line, the flagship of which is the StorEdge T3 – code name Purple – which fits 300 Gb in a box the size of a desktop computer.

Sun’s StorEdge range is designed to plug into AIX and Windows NT networks as wel as Sun’s own Solaris environments. Linux support is also planned - the goal is to provide open, scalable storage to work in heterogeneous environments. Having said this, fifteen years ago Sun was one of the first companies to apply the “Open Systems” label to its Unix-based workstation and server products. In this context, “open” meant, “can communicate with other Unix systems.” It is worth delving a little into what Sun means by open storage – look no further than Jiro.

Jiro (previously known as StoreX) has been on the cards for a long time – a good couple of years, if memory serves. Essentially Jiro provides a set of interfaces to enable heterogeneous storage systems to be managed, configured and allocated as a single, virtual hierarchy. The StorEdge range of products will be Jiro-enabled and, as Sun’s \link{ http://www.sun.com/storage/index.html,Storage web site} proudly boasts, “many technology industry leaders support the Jiro effort.” This includes companies like Veritas and Legato, who together have the storage software market pretty much sewn up.

Trouble is, Jiro isn’t the only storage management standardisation effort in town. The Storage Networking Industry Association (which can be found \link{http://www.snia.org,here} is looking to provide exactly what Jiro supports. Similarly, the Distributed Management Task Force is also working on storage management standards. The good news is that the two organisations are working together. So what of Jiro? Companies like Veritas freely admit that they are standards-agnostic and they are supporting the work of SNIA and Jiro, not to mention efforts of other organisations such as the Fibre Alliance. Companies such as EMC and Sterling (now part of CA) have also proudly presented their storage management facilities, all the time actively supporting the standards bodies.

All in all, storage management standardisation is not a pretty picture. No doubt, as with Java, Sun’s idea of an open standard is one that Sun has the casting vote over. Jiro may have its technical merits and it may have the buy in of other organisations, but it appears that the possibility of a truly open storage environment is a long way off yet.

(First published 15 June 2000)