Sun Microsystems announced the expansion of its leading storage virtualization portfolio with the introduction of the Sun StorageTek 9990V Enterprise Storage System, concurrent with its technology partner Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. . Today's announcement further drives the development of the OpenSolaris storage community and is the latest in a long and successful partnership between the two companies that has yielded some of the industry's most important storage technology breakthroughs to help enterprises solve complex data management challenges.

The new Sun StorageTek 9990V storage system delivers industry-leading performance and scalability along with new thin provisioning capabilities with Dynamic Provisioning software that improves storage utilization, saves money and gives customers an easy, transparent way of adding additional storage as needed over time. The StorageTek 9990V expands Sun's StorageTek 9900 product family to include the enterprise-entry Sun StorageTek 9985, Sun StorageTek 9990 storage system for the data center and new Sun StorageTek 9990V storage offering for the highest-end of the data center market.

"Sun and Hitachi Data Systems have a rich history of solving complex data management problems that reduce time-to-market and total cost of ownership (TCO) for high-end enterprise customers. Together we have helped thousands of enterprises in all industries across the globe address their unique data management challenges. We are pleased to bring the new dynamic provisioning capabilities to customers," said Nigel Dessau, senior vice-president of marketing and business operations, Storage, Sun Microsystems, Inc.