Sun Microsystems Inc. and EMC Corp. on Monday are expected to release new and updated storage systems that can be used to take on growing corporate regulatory compliance tasks.

Sun"s new StorEdge 5310 Compliance Archiving System, its first disk-based archiving system, is based on a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance Sun purchased from Procom Technology Inc. in Irvine, Calif., and includes its own compliance software.

Meanwhile, EMC unveiled upgrades to its Centera content-addressed storage (CAS) system that triple its capacity, increase its ability to replicate to multiple remote sites and can partition storage based on business application needs.

The Sun StorEdge 5310 can be configured with either Serial ATA disk drives or Fibre Channel drives and can scale to 179TB. The Sun box offers storage retention policy enforcement, access controls and authentication of data integrity.

Tom Martin, director of NAS marketing at Sun, said the array targets companies undertaking Windows server consolidations, long-term archiving, and compliance projects.

Price Points

Unlike EMC"s Centera, Sun"s 5310 doesn"t offer single-instancing technology, which ensures that only one copy of a specific document or image is stored. The box instead is aimed at undercutting its competition on price, Martin said.

A 6TB model of the box sells for US$82,000. EMC"s 4.4TB Centera model starts at $148,000, while the 2.2TB version is less than $100,000.

EMC said the Centera array"s updated CentraStar management software now offers virtual pooling of storage. The box can also replicate its virtual pools of storage to multiple sites, whereas before it could replicate only to one backup site.

"This puts access and security privileges by application between these pools of storage," said Sean Lanagan, director of product management and emerging products at EMC.

Another CAS Entry

The Sun and EMC moves come shortly after Storage Technology Corp. introduced the IntelliStore array, its first homegrown CAS system, which also uses ATA disk drives and targets regulatory compliance tasks.

Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., contended that while most buyers of the technology cite regulatory compliance to justify their purchases, the uptick in sales of disk-based archival systems is really driven simply by the need to get at information.

Eunice estimated that to date, only 10 percent of such systems are used for regulatory compliance tasks.