Groth says Sun is targeting the new systems at small and medium-sized businesses -- those with 1,000 or fewer employees -- as well as "Tier 1 and 2 Web infrastructure" providers. In another new development, Sun's low-end storage line will be distributed by Tech Data Corp. (Nasdaq: TECD).
The 3510 Fibre Channel array is "really the only system on the market that merges enterprise features with value pricing," claims Groth. The system provides up to 12 drives per 2U chassis; three units can be connected, for a total of 36 drives, or 5.2 TBytes configured with 146-GByte drives. In addition, the 3510 provides eight Fibre Channel host ports and up to 1,024 logical unit numbers (LUNs), which is at least twice that of competing products.
"Most of our competitors are offering de-featured midrange products for this market segment," says Groth.
But at least EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), which sells a good portion of its low-end and midrange storage through Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), would dispute this. Moreover, EMC argues that its Clariion CX line is able to provide unmatched flexibility as a customer's storage needs increase over time. The entry-level CX200 shares the same software, hardware architecture, and disk drives as the CX400 and CX600, providing an upgrade path up to 35 TBytes -- nearly seven times what Sun's StorEdge 3510 offers.
Meanwhile, Sun's 3310 NAS server is available in the same drive configurations as the 3510 and runs an embedded, proprietary operating system (Groth wouldn't tell us which one) that can support as many as 128 file systems. The NAS server supports both Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File System (NFS) protocols. "This is an ultradense solution, optimized for a blade server environment -- it's capable of supporting hundreds of blades," Groth says.
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