Sun doubles capacity of storage server
The company adds roomier disk drives to its StorEdge T3 storage server, doubling the top capacity from 88 to 169 terabytes.
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The T3 fits into the more expensive end of the "network-attached storage" (NAS) market, a booming business for many companies selling products to customers who need to accommodate ever-larger Web sites, email traffic and other computing tasks. Sun introduced the first T3 models in June.
Sun upgraded the product by using Seagate's 73GB Cheetah hard drives, said Bryan Young, T3 marketing product manager.
Feeding the customer's appetite for storage has been a lucrative business for Network Appliance and EMC, and Sun is among the host of computing companies hoping to benefit from the growing market.
But that storage space doesn't come cheap. The T3, Sun's highest-end offering, costs $151,000 for a 1.3-terabyte version and $604,000 for a 5.2-terabyte version.
The T3 is designed to be bolted to racks popular in data centers. A T3 is built of interconnected modules, each 12.25 inches tall and holding up to 1.3 terabytes. That means that a 169-terabyte configuration would take up 32 racks with four modules each.