So when asked to reconcile McNealy's view with the StorageTek business Sun acquired last year, company executives chuckled politely and said the company is spending millions of dollars acquiring mainframes for storage-related development. But more importantly, 'it's not the hardware that's important, it's the way we tie into those applications,' said Jon Benson, vice president of development in Sun's StorageTek.

Prior to the acquisition, about 40 percent of StorageTek customers used mainframes.

Indeed, Sun's project Honeycomb, which the company demonstrated, includes an embedded search technology that will allow application writers to offload the search capabilities to the storage system. Sun said the technology will speed access to data and improve the ability to use it.

One user at Tuesday's event, Justin Shaffer, vice president and chief architect for Major League Baseball Advance Media L.P., said he's interested in the Honeycomb system because it moves the storage closer to the data. 'The more efficient we can make processes internally for accessing media and then redistributing it, the better off we are,' he said.

Sun announced a number of storage-related products -- including a new release of its virtualization and data management tool, the Sun StorageTek VSM system 5 -- which is designed for mainframe environments and doubles capacity and performance from its previous generation, the company said.