about it, there are no easy wow acquisitions out there," said Forrester analyst Frank Gillett.
StorageTek's coming ILM products
StorageTek's ILM business has yet to prove itself, Gillett added. "StorageTek has the capability to be competitive, but they haven't publicly come out with anything. It could be that Sun is buying stuff we can't see yet," he said.
It's likely some of what Sun can see will come into view next week, though.
StorageTek plans to debut its first in-house ILM product June 8, a disk-based archiving system that has built-in "intelligence" to automate the process. And StorageTek's ILM push could fit well with Sun's Honeycomb storage equipment coming later this year.
ILM so far is "perceived as more hype than reality," said Data Mobility Group analyst John Webster. "It's got a lot of promise as something that people can put on developmental roadmaps."
One factor keeping it from fulfilling its promise is missing software support, he said. If the applications that actually generate files and data don't dovetail with the ILM systems, ILM is little more than a fancy backup system.
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