Sun Microsystems and Avnet Technology Solutions announced a distribution agreement to offer the complete line of Sun StorageTek products to Avnet partners. Such an announcement has been expected since Sun acquired StorageTek last year.
Avnet will add Sun’s SPARC servers as well as the company’s dual-core AMD-based servers, upgrades to which were announced last week. Avnet hopes that the expansion of storage offerings to include disk and tape hardware, software and services will make it easier for partners to accelerate growth.
Products included in the expanded distribution relationship include disk systems, Network-Attached Storage (NAS) systems, storage management software, storage networking and tape storage, in addition to select Sun Fire servers in support of the storage business. The products will be offered through Avnet’s Partner Solutions division in the United States.
“We expect the addition of Sun’s complete line of Sun StorageTek products to Avnet’s offerings will help increase partner opportunities to capitalize on the strength of Sun’s products and Avnet’s enterprise storage expertise and technical knowledge,” said Jeff Barteld, director, U.S. channel sales at Sun Microsystems.
As part of the arrangement, Avent will provide Sun reseller partners with sales support, marketing services, and training and business development programs. Avnet says Sun’s storage portfolio will allow simpler and more efficient data management while cutting the costs of data utilization and retrieval.
Included in the deal is the distribution of three new x64 server lines introduced by Sun last week. Sun unveiled the Sun Fire X4600, which the company claims to be the “industry’s fastest” 4-16 way server, and the only one operating n a 4U chassis.
The X4500 data server includes 24 terabytes of storage, bolstering Sun’s claim of breaking the $2 per gigabyte storage barrier.
“The concept of a data server is a boon to companies that have been searching for an efficient way to deploy high-bandwidth applications from a local server,” said John Fowler, executive vice president of the Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.
“We really believe the introduction of the Sun Fire X4500 server will kick off a new wave of integrated storage and server solutions, making it easier for customers in these industries to lower their total cost of ownership and increase their revenue streams.”
Sun also unveiled the Blade 8000 Modular System, a new enterprise-class modular computing platform for the datacenter, based on Sun’s “Galaxy” x64 (x86, 64-bit) server architecture. Sun says the Blade 8000 uses 20 percent less power and takes up half the space of rackmount servers.
