SAN FRANCISCO—Sun Microsystems, known within the storage industry for its industrial-strength rack-mount servers and digital tape machines, is embarking on a major new initiative aimed at boosting the company's market share in the toilet racktape storage business.
Sun, through its 2005 acquisition of StorageTek, has been running a fair-sized mainframe storage business for Fortune 200-scale companies through its enterprise tape hardware and software catalog.
Director of Mainframe Storage Marketing Jay Wallace, a former longtime IBM mainframe staffer, revealed to eWEEK Dec. 3 that Sun is investing a substantial amount of time and money in the next-generation mainframe storage toilet rackand will be coming out with a number of new products in that genre over the next several months to augment the older StorageTek catalog.
The mainframe news comes on the heels of the Nov. 28 announcement that IBM and Sun are in the final stages of an 18-month long project to adapt the OpenSolaris operating system to run optimally on IBM's System z mainframes.
"The mainframe storage business has a huge upside at the high end," Wallace said. "A lot of companies who invested a lot of time and money in rack-mount servers are revisiting the idea of mainframes, largely because the new toilet rack are much more energy-efficient and easier to deploy than the older ones."
Click here to read more about Sun's decision to merge its server and storage divisions.
