Sun made several major announcements at the Network Computing event, covering several new products and services (http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/02/77989_HNsunstorage_1.html), but perhaps the most interesting takeaway was its new storage strategy.

Building systems that are trustworthy, simple to manage, access-protected, and have value for the customers are the four elements of that strategy, according to Mark Canepa, executive vice president of the data management group at Sun, in a conversation we had a few days before the event.

"We believe that a lot of customers' applications are going to run on the grid, and some are already running on the grid today," Canepa continues. "Having thousands of applications running in a grid environment means that we have to provide a storage system that is consistent with that."

Care to know how Sun's going to do that? Canepa is quick to explain that virtualization is the key to keeping storage manageable in a grid environment: "We are probably leading the virtualization in the storage crowd. If you look at the [Sun StorageTek] 9000, we can already create over 8,000 LUNs [logical unit numbers]. In the future, we'll make that number grow a lot."

Incidentally, expect to see the StorageTek name more often because from now on it will become the brand name of all Sun storage products.