Resell agreement extended through 2006 Claiming increased market share and strong customer growth due to its relationship with Hitachi Data Systems, Sun Microsystems on Monday announced it has expanded that resell agreement through 2006.The extension of the August 2001 agreement between the two companies follows a recently struck partnership between Network Appliance and Veritas Software, and of course EMC’s impending acquisition of Legato. These moves possibly indicate that customers are not convinced one vendor can fulfill their every storage need.According to Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Sun Network Storage, the relationship with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has been a great success. “Our market share in the datacenter has grown from no presence to 10 percent [of the datacenter market since the original agreement],” said Canepa. “But the real winners are the customers that can now simplify its storage and networks.”The agreement has Sun reselling HDS’s Lightning 9900 V Series of arrays under the name Sun StorEdge 9000. Canepa estimates Sun has shipped 5 petabytes of HDS storage in the form of 90,000 disks between the four systems: 9970, 9980, 9910, and 9960.In addition to extending the duration of the partnership, Canepa said the two will work closer to promote open standards that make managing heterogeneous storage easier. Dave Roberson, president and COO of HDS, agrees that this relationship has been beneficial for his company.“We’re very pleased with this relationship,” said Roberson. “It has helped us grow in coverage, both in the number of customers and geographically.”He called the relationship a successful model of collaboration and said the expectation of product shipped has met their expectation. We did not rule out the possibility that the relationship could be expanded to permit Sun to resell more of HDS’ storage systems. HDS resells NAS devices developed by its partner Network Appliance. Technology Industry