Storage Toolkit

Will Honeycomb sweeten Sun's future?

Stephen Shankland CNET News

Published: 28 Jan 2005 17:40 GMT

Sun, undaunted by past issues in its storage system efforts, is working on a new project, dubbed Honeycomb, that aims to improve reliability and performance.

The Honeycomb technology, which will go on sale later this year, has two goals: to speed up data-retrieval tasks such as searching and to make disk failure a nearly ignorable event, said Mark Canepa, executive vice-president of Sun's storage group.

Key to the search-related promise of Honeycomb is descriptive information called metadata. When a computer stores a file, it includes some basic metadata, such as the time the file was written or modified, but Sun is among those pushing for vastly more elaborate -- and therefore useful -- metadata.

A prime market for this technology is the health care arena, where urgency, complexity and stringent regulations put a premium on the ability to retrieve specific data. For example, using metadata to rapidly filter search results, "I can find females with a particular type of cancer for whom I can see X-rays," said Mike Davis, Honeycomb's senior product manager.

The disk failure side of the equation has to do with storing data across hundreds or large numbers of disks, far more than are found in currently popular RAID systems. The idea behind both approaches: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

At the end of 2004, Sun transferred the Honeycomb team from Sun Labs to its product group. Honeycomb technology will be brought to market both as new standalone systems and as an improvement to existing midrange models, Canepa said.

Sun and storage
Sun, which primarily sells servers and server software, sees the world somewhat differently from storage specialists such as EMC. Sun has argued for years that it's better to buy an integrated system rather than individual components that must be interconnected by hand.