Sun adds new functions, features to StorEdge 6920

12.04.2005
Von Bob Francis

Sun Microsystems Inc. Tuesday announced several enhancements to its Sun StorEdge 6920 that are designed to help customers consolidate storage assets and ensure data availability in a reasonably priced midtier system.

"The 6920 is our warhorse for midtier storage and the announcements today center around consolidation, business continuity, strong scalability, and no single point of failure," said Doug Wood, senior director of Enterprise Storage Systems at Sun.

The new release includes a new StorEdge Data Replicator that allows users to replicate data volumes to protect against data loss from system, site, or regional disaster. "We"ve added support for synchronous and asynchronous remote snapshots as well as other data recovery features," Wood said.

New to the StorEdge 6920 is also the StorEdge Data Mirror, which allows IT managers to create full copies of application data volumes, split them off for use by another application and then allow them to be rejoined as needed. Also new to the StorEdge 6920 is support for the integration of multivendor storage assets into the system to simplify storage management and improve resource utilization. According to Wood, customers can deploy a tiered storage architecture from a single StorEdge 6920 system and migrate data to lower-cost storage.

Enhanced features in the new release include StorEdge Data Snapshot, which creates frequent and regular snapshots of application data to minimize the window for data loss caused by software errors, user errors, and viruses. Also receiving an enhancement is StorEdge Pool Manager that now simplifies consolidation and capacity management by enabling users to virtualize multivendor storage assets without disruption.

Prices for the StorEdge 6920 begin at US$125,000 for a system with 2TB of storage. The new features and enhancements will be available at the end of June.