Beta-tester Bill Paraska, director of university computing at Georgia State University in Atlanta, praised the StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliance for its flexibility and ease of configuration, noting that it took just a couple of hours to set up. 'A SAN would have been days or weeks,' he said.

The university is using the device to do journal backups of its PeopleSoft and Banner ERP systems to improve its disaster recovery. 'What we're actually doing is taking Oracle transaction logs from those systems and using the Sun device to do journal updates as they occur,' Paraska said. The journal updates are performed hourly, which means that the university loses at most an hour's worth of data, instead of two weeks, he said. Paraska is also looking at using the device for storing research computations and for the Novell GroupWise administrative e-mail system.

The 5320 NAS Appliance is an extension of Sun's current 5000 NAS family and will replace the existing 5310 device. It is based on technology the company obtained from its acquisition of Procom Technology Inc. a year ago and has a new processor based on Advanced Micro Devices Inc. 64-bit Opteron processor. Previously, the device had been based on the Sun V65 server.

The 5320 NAS Appliance is set to ship within the next 30 days for a starting price of US$49,990 for 2.5TB. A high-availability cluster version, with two heads, starts at $68,990.

Sun did not formally announce its Honeycomb content-addressed storage device, which it has been demonstrating recently. But Honeycomb is shipping now in limited quantities and will be generally available this quarter, said James Whitemore, vice president and chief marketing officer for Sun's data management group. The device stores metadata and makes it available through application programming interfaces to applications, which makes it searchable and retrievable. It is similar to hierarchical storage management but allows an application to put it into production as required, he said.