Sun announced the first two members of a midrange storage family, the StorageTek 6140 and the StorageTek 6540 disk arrays on Thursday.

Both models use a modular design for lower initial cost and for expandability, and both can accommodate SATA-2 or Fibre Channel drives, the company said.

Storage managers are looking for solutions that scale in performance, capacity and capability, said John McArthur, Group Vice President and General Manager at IDC. The new Sun solutions can meet these business critical applications, he explains.

The StorageTek 6140, well suited for hosting databases, starts at $25,000, has a maximum capacity of 112 disk drives and a 4GB cache, and is immediately available.

The StorageTek 6540, geared for databases or high-performance computing, starts at $85,000. It has a maximum capacity of 224 disk drives, a 16 GB cache, and will be available in about a month, Sun said.

Sun