Sun ready to let public taste Honeycomb storage box

Opteron buzz

By Ashlee Vance in Chicago • Get more from this author

Posted in Storage, 28th December 2004 00:24 GMT

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Sun Microsystems has finally made a very public confession about its once top secret storage project code-named Honeycomb.

IDG's enterprising enterprise reporter Bob McMillan worked new details about the Opteron-based NAS (network attached storage) system out of Sun's storage marketing director James Whitemore. Sun has confirmed our original report that identified the Honeycomb box as a 3U high system with four Opteron processors and loads of storage - 1,600GB - available for each processor.

Our insiders once doubted that Honeycomb would ever actually make it to market, but Sun is now saying that the system could be ready in six months. It will be sold either as part of a larger storage configuration or as a standalone box.

Sun is bragging loudly about the system's ability to search and retrieve files at a quick clip. The Honeycomb boxes will run specialized indexing software to pull this off, Whitemore said.

Does Sun think the technology is a big deal?

"If we get it right, it'll be as big as NFS (Network File System)," Whitemore told IDG.

That sounds a bit brash. Our sources indicate the Honeycomb boxes would simply be fast, cheap storage systems that make good use of Sun's file system technology. Sun's storage division hasn't produced anything terribly exciting in a long while, and there is no reason to expect this trend to change with a NAS system. ®