• Customers need more economical storage - to buy and own.
  The growth of on-line data, especially “fixed content” data is explosive. Many large scale customers have already passed the Petabyte boundary. For these environments, it's important to reduce the cost of the storage platform by using commodity components. Furthermore, large-scale storage today is more expensive to maintain than it is to purchase. Our customers simply cannot continue to add sysadmins as their data grows, and we need to dislocate conventiontional wisdom on "how many TB can be managed by a single Sysadmin?".
• Customers need improved reliability, availability and serviceability.
  In today's systems, these characteristics add to storage acquisition cost and to TCO. In the future, RAS needs to be improved while lowering both ownership and acquisition cost. That means a system that will tolerate lots of failures and heal itself appropriately without anyone needing to show up at 2am on a Saturday.
• Customers need transparent and non-disruptive scalability.
  Our customers are demanding “just in time” storage provisioning. Customers should only have to pay for storage as it's needed, and when it's deployed, scaling must not cause any disruption to the customer's application or clients. The problem is particularly acute for archival applications that scale steadily over time. Utility pricing (the ability to charge monthly just for the GB used), helps in this regard by eliminating the capital budgeting process for customers.
• Customers need to more easily organize and find data.
  It's clear that when we're talking about millions or hundreds of millions of files, the management and protection of metadata (data about the data) is as important as the management and protection of data. All storage systems today ignore application metadata, and in order to find their data, customers deploy external databases with search capability that carry substantial costs and management burden. If these data attributes are damaged or lost, the data itself is effectively lost. In addition to application attribute metadata, customers increasingly need to track whether the data is obsolete, current, ownerless, mission-critical, or in need of regulatory treatment. Today, expensive humans manage this, but the right system architecture can greatly simplify the process.

Honeycomb is a collection of hardware and software technologies that solve problems around next generation large-scale “data hungry” applications. That includes better methods for reliability, availability, scaling, and even searching and organizing data. Honeycomb's features were explicitly designed to address the customer problems articulated above. Currently, there is not a technology solution offered that addresses the following customer pain points effectively. Honeycomb is being designed to fill this void in the market. Honeycomb can be deployed as technology components that complement existing NAS products, or even as a standalone storage system.

Honeycomb demonstrates Sun's dedication to solving next generation data storage and management problems. It's not about simply beating competition, it's about giving customers strategically powerful data management solutions.

LAN-attached storage, inclulding NAS, CAS, HSM, and other file-based services calls upon the ultimate convergence of CPUs, OS, protocols, and networks. All of these things are core competencies of Sun. If we think towards next generation devices, we look to clustering, cryptography, consolidation and grid capabilities, load balancing, database, utility models, and a host of other areas, again all core competencies of Sun. The challenge is to make them all work together to solve unsolved customer problems. From Jonathan down we are committed to making that happen and that's why I work here.

I know what you're thinking..."the devil is in the details". Well, the details above are all I can provide until later this year when the NDA covers can be lifted a bit. Stay tuned for more.