Sun Shifts Storage Strategy to Midrange

June 12, 2000 (Computerworld)

Sun Microsystems Inc. is counting on a shift to the midrange to jump-start a storage effort that some users and analysts said needed a push.
The company will announce the T300 storage system, code-named Purple, on Wednesday, according to sources.
Purple is a modular Fibre Channel disk array that will be implemented in storage-area network (SAN) environments.
Analysts said the announcement marks a shift in Sun's storage strategy from a mainframe focus to a midrange focus. According to Steve Duplessie, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group in Milford, Mass., Purple is the successor to StorEdge A7000 and other products in Sun's StorEdge A line, which are geared for mainframe and Solaris environments.
Users had mixed reactions to the expected news.
John Amos, director of financial systems at McKessonHBOC Inc., said Purple could potentially fit into the firm's storage plans if the price is right and if it allows disk arrays to be swapped from one system to another and to be reconfigured in a timely manner.
A San Francisco-based drug distributor and software company, McKessonHBOC currently uses a range of redundant disk arrays from Sun.
Evan Benrubi, vice president of systems and technology at Transamerica Intellitech Inc. in Miami, said he has no plans to deploy Purple, because his firm doesn't need additional storage capacity.
Transamerica Intellitech was the first company to install Sun's StorEdge A7000, said Benrubi. But he said he has been disappointed with Sun's support. The vendor failed to deliver certain functionality, such as fail-over capabilities, and its support has become less personal, he said.
An Improvement
But Purple will be an improvement over the A7000 according to analysts.
"Purple has a better chance than their other storage announcements," said John Webster, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H. "They've thought it through better" on the software front, he said.
Duplessie said Sun has some fence-mending to do.
Purple allows Sun "to get back in the game, but it's burned customers (in the past) with inferior products," Duplessie said, adding that Sun will have to prove to users that it will support Purple.
Sun is also expected to outline its storage strategy and unveil network-attached storage and SAN products for companies ranging from dot-coms to large enterprises.
According to one source, Purple will support both Sun's Solaris and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT.
Sun didn't return calls seeking comment.