By Leslie T. O'Neill

February 28, 2008 - Until recently, digital archives were needed only by transaction-intensive and data-dense computing environments such as multinational banks, research institutions, and movie studios, but now they are quickly becoming a key component of almost every organization's storage strategy. The growth of consumer-driven data, legal and other electronic discovery requests, digital asset repurposing, and perpetual data retention requirements, have made traditional approaches to archiving--which are nothing more than extensions of short-term data protection architectures--unable to fulfill today's archiving requirements.

"Today's IT organizations face three major storage challenges," says Dave Kenyon, Sun's Vice President of Storage Product Management and Marketing Operations: "storing the exploding amounts of data generated on the network, retaining the data long enough--often forever--to comply with burgeoning government regulations and business requirements, and being able to efficiently search and retrieve that data, all within flat IT capital and operating budgets."

Sun's industry-leading, scalable, and efficient open data archive solutions enable these organizations to change the economic equation for their IT departments. Sun's data archive offerings are 10 times more scalable, use 50 percent less physical space, and can reduce energy costs by a factor of 10 over competing products. "Sun's archive solutions just work better because our intelligent archive management software automates the movement of data across multiple tiers of storage, optimizing the storage media used against data-value and user-defined performance requirements," says Kenyon. "Competing solutions offer expensive disk-only storage and/or require excessive manual touches to move data across storage media – costs and complexity that quickly spiral out of control when you think about 100 year-plus archives."

"Nobody approaches archiving the way Sun does," says Kenyon. "Whereas other vendors require proprietary software and hardware and tie their customers into vertically integrated frameworks, Sun delivers open solutions that reduce technology and vendor risk and that change the economic equation for archiving. Open source software, open formats and APIs, and products designed to work in the most heterogeneous environments are all part of our open approach, and all of them translate into real customer value."

New Scalable and Efficient Archive Products

Sun is already the industry leader in archiving: More than 37 percent of the world's archived data resides on StorageTek gear. Now Sun is expanding its archive offerings by bringing the "rocket science" of enterprise archive technology to more organizations than ever before. The new Sun StorageTek SL3000 modular library system, the Sun StorageTek T9840D tape drive, the Sun StorageTek Crypto KMS 2.0 encryption key management system, and the Customer Ready Infinite Archive System multi-tiered storage archive appliance were designed to be efficient, cost-effective, open and ecologically responsible.

The SL3000 not only makes sense for an organization's budget, it is good for the environment. "We took the technology of our large-scale SL8500 tape library and brought it into a configuration that's more economical for midrange customers," says Kenyon, "and it allows them to scale up to a very large archive." Like its larger cousin, the SL3000 accommodates existing tape drives via Sun's unique Any Cartridge, Any Slot technology, producing a truly heterogeneous tape archiving environment in which you can put any tape drive in any slot and it will operate correctly.

Best-in-class scalability, mixed media and partitioning features, along with open systems and mainframe support, give you a great opportunity to consolidate islands of archive tape storage into a more efficient and economical centralized asset. And unlike other midrange library systems, the SL3000 protects against downtime – it will continue to operate even while you add or replace a robot as well as upgrade or add tape drives to maximize performance.

In addition, the new StorageTek SL3000 modular library system can cut your storage footprint in half while reducing the amount of energy used by as much as 10 times less than competing tape libraries. This innovative archive library also accesses archived data as much as 50 percent faster than competing solutions due to its innovative Centerline architecture.

Also now available is the Sun StorageTek T9840D tape drive, the only fast-access tape drive in the industry. Its average data access time is as much as four times faster than conventional capacity-centric tape drives, it encrypts data for maximum security, and it is able to reformat and reuse the same media purchased with the Gen 1 drive 10 years ago, protecting your media investment in a way that can translate into savings of about $70 per cartridge. That adds up to a whopping $210,000 for all 3,000 slots in the StorageTek SL3000 modular library system.

Sun is also hard at work putting storage software technologies into the open source community, starting with the StorageTek 5800 system. Also known as Honeycomb, the StorageTek 5800 system is based on the Solaris 10 OS, and it's the only storage appliance with embedded meta-data tagging for efficient search and retrieval. Just as important, it's the first storage hardware with open sourced software, which allows you to quickly create storage applications to meet your company's needs, with support from Sun. Honeycomb architecture provides long-term preservation, protection, and integrity of massive data stores with extensive metadata facilities. Continuing its leadership in contributing free and open source software to the IT community, Sun is the first vendor to commit to open sourcing a key archive management system.

The Sun StorageTek Crypto KMS encryption key management system works with Sun tape drives to offer the simplest, most secure and most scalable archive data encryption system on the market. Building on the widely adopted KMS 1.0, KMS 2.0 offers several enhancements for ease of operation. KMS 2.0 extends Sun's leadership in data security already evidenced by the existing portfolio of best-in-class Identity management software and OS/server-based encryption capabilities.

Sun today is launching its Customer Ready Infinite Archive System, the first multi-tiered storage appliance on the market. With its robust policy set, the appliance stores your data at the right price point for the speed of data access your organization requires. Moreover, a 90TB Customer Ready Infinite Archive System archive solution is more than 35 percent less expensive than competing products and consumes only one-third of their power, which means that its all-in-one tiered storage structure can save your company as much as 65 percent on this energy cost. It also comes with a new graphical user interface that makes it easy to manage the system.

From storage media to drives to libraries to the software that runs it all, Sun's scalable, efficient, and open digital archive solutions can change the economic equation for your company's IT organization. Whether you opt for a few of Sun's archive products to augment your current infrastructure or build a complete, end-to-end digital archive solution, you can create the most intelligent and secure digital archive. Top it off with the Solaris ZFS file system, and you've also built the most easily manageable archive possible.