This article is more than 1 year old

Sun's Amber Road traffic picks up

800 customers and counting

Sun looks to have a raging product success on its hand with 800 plus Open Storage 7000 sales in the five months since its launch, making it the fastest ever ramping product in Sun's storage product portfolio. It's updated the product as well.

Known as Amber Road, the Open Storage 7000 product combines an open source system and storage software stack, including OpenSolaris and the ZFS file system, commodity controller hardware and simple disk enclosures.

The entry-level 7110 (a single quad-core Opteron controller) has had its storage capacity doubled from 2TB to 4TB. The mid-range 7210 (two quad-core Opterons in controller) sees its storage capacity more than triple, from 46TB (with 1TB SATA drives) to 142TB.

It has been speculated that Sun Open Storage is highly attractive to Sun acquirer Oracle because it is such a low cost storage base for running the Oracle database and middleware applications.

The Open Storage software has been upgraded too, with more than 15 new features added to its analytic capabilities and its Windows integration.

Sun has also introduced new Open Archive products that bundle either the 7110 or 7210 with SunFire X4140 and X4240 servers and Symantec's Enterprise Vault 8 software. The products are intended for mid-sized businesses needing to archive unstructured and semi-structured file-based data, ranging from Instant Messages to SharePoint data.

These enhancements look like reinforcing success and must have been developed and planned while the Sun board was hawking the company around prospective buyers. However, the enhancements also make the 7000 line stronger competition for Sun's traditional storage arrays; and while Open Storage 7000 sales were booming, customers of Sun's traditional storage products were keeping their hands in their pockets.

There is news here for Sun's storage competition, as the Amber Road feature mix clearly has market appeal. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like