Storage Enhancements May Brighten Sun's ProspectsStorage Enhancements May Brighten Sun's Prospects

Sun Microsystems' first two quarters of fiscal 2002 have been bruising, and increased competition from Linux vendors is adding another worry. The company is counting on enhancements to its storage products, as well as manufacturing-line improvements that promise to lower system costs, to boost the rest of the year.

Sun is expected this week to provide IT executives with a single, cost-effective framework for handling backup, recovery, and resource-and volume-management operations for its modular T3 storage system and the Hitachi 9900 storage unit it resells. The command suite will integrate storage-management products Sun has acquired from numerous vendors, which previously were separately priced packages. Sun wouldn't comment on any new offerings, but sources say the vendor also may introduce dedicated, Solaris-based hardware to act as a console for managing large storage area networks.

Sun's increased emphasis on comprehensive storage-management offerings comes a little late. It's already lost some server customers' storage business to more-aggressive vendors. Littlewoods PLC, a large Web retailer in Liverpool, England, has consolidated 35 HP-UX and two IBM-Sequent Unix servers down to four Sun E10000 servers. But, says David Hallett, Littlewoods' group IT director, "we've got EMC for our disk storage, and we're more than happy with it."

Littlewoods also is happy about the $1.1 million annual maintenance savings it's realizing from the consolidation, Hallett says. Sun says it can bring down server costs even more by simplifying procurement, manufacturing, and financing.

Last month, the vendor shipped its 106-CPU 15K system in volume, completing its plan to build all its servers using the same components. It also implemented a rapid-production program to build customized server and storage systems preconfigured with Oracle's database and Siebel Systems Inc.'s customer-relationship management software. Finally, through partners such as GE Capital, it's broadening financing options: Instead of paying every month, customers can contract to pay based on their best cash-flow times.