Sun Archive, Compliance and Storage News

Sun Microsystems Inc. announced a number of archive products. In addition, the company unveiled its governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) strategy and access control compliance software.

Focal Points:

• Sun announced four new archive products, including a adding a scalable, energy-conscious midrange modular library, the StorageTek SL3000 Modular Library System, and a fourth-generation fast-access tape drive, the Sun StorageTek T9840D. The SL3000 (also known as "Crimson") is based on the Sun StorageTek SL8500 and is targeted for midrange environments. It can support up to 3,000 slots, delivers up to 50% reduction in space and up to 10 times the power savings over comparable libraries, the company stated. The system is non-disruptively upgradeable, offers flexible partitioning, and improves time to data speed by up to 50 percent, officials asserted. The StorageTek T9840D tape drives offer average data access times up to four times faster than conventional capacity-centric tape drives and has encryption built into the drives, Sun claimed. Encryption for the drives come from Sun Crypto Key Management System (KMS) 2.0, which delivers a single, centralized key encryption architecture for multi-vendor tape drives including the Hewlett-Packard Co. LTO, the T9840D, and Sun StorageTek T10000 products. Sun is also committing to open source its key management system.
• Sun's new Customer Ready Infinite Archive System (CIS 3) enhances its first multi-tiered archive appliance with the most robust policy set for automation of archive data movement across tiers of storage, according to officials. Sun stated the system is built around its Storage Archive Manager (SAM) software and offers optional tiers of performance and capacity disk along with tape storage for less active archive data. Sun also recently announced that is has donated the source code for the Sun StorageTek 5800 digital archive storage system, formerly known as “Project Honeycomb,” to open source communities.
• Sun announced the availability of its new Sun Role Manager software, formerly known as Vaau RBACx, which provides comprehensive role lifecycle management and identity compliance capabilities. The software features rolebased access control and identity-based controls automation, continuous monitoring to scan for "role versus actual" segregation of duties and other exceptions, and extensive analysis and reporting on role changes, policy violations, and potential role refinements. Sun completed its acquisition of Vaau Inc., an enterprise risk management software provider, in February. Sun also unveiled its GRC strategy to help companies better manage identities, auditing and compliance across the entire enterprise. Sun officials stated the company expects to deliver significant new product releases across the entire identity management suite within the next 12 months. Its portfolio will address all areas of identity management, including access management, auditing, federation, and Web services security.

Experton Group believes Sun's executive team is finally executing a strategy designed to leverage all its assets and aimed at acquiring additional solutions to fill in key gaps. This is a welcome change, which will further improve the turnaround already in progress. IT executives can expect Sun to exploit all channels at its disposal, including open source and business partner relationships with traditional competitors such as IBM Corp. IT executives should consider Sun back on track, a low-risk, financially stable provider and a thought leader in data center and networking services and technologies.