Storage Station - General - Sun Pushing Ahead in Tape Library Sales

Sun Pushing Ahead in Tape Library Sales

May 28, 2008
1 minute read
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Companies generally play it close to the vest when it comes to talking about numbers of products sold. Market-share reports are one thing, but actual sales figures are not commonly available.

Not Sun Microsystems, however. Today, May 28, Sun will announce what it calls “a significant milestone in the IT industry”: The delivery of the 10,000th Sun StorageTek SL500 tape library since 2005, when the company bought Colorado-based StorageTek for $4.1 billion.

Sun also said it has started shipping its new, energy-efficient Sun StorageTek SL3000 midrange modular library, which works with operating systems such as Linux and Sun’s own Solaris — and, as Sun claims, offers double the storage density of similar products on the market.

Based on the SL8500 modular enterprise library system, the SL3000 is the first midrange-aimed library that allows a customer to upgrade up to 3,000 slots on the fly without downtime and the first such library to enable consolidation of existing tape drive and media hardware, the company said.

All the Sun tape libraries run Solaris 10 OS with the super-fast Zettabyte File System (ZFS) — the only OS designed to provide end-to-end checksumming for all data, to ensure data integrity. For more information on Solaris ZFS, go here.

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