Project Honeycomb will allow users to 'Google' their data Sun Microsystems has quietly moved a team of approximately 20 of its research engineers into its network storage product group, assigning them the task of developing a storage appliance designed for massive data archives. At the heart of the device is Project Honeycomb, a technology originally developed by the company’s R&D group, Sun Labs.Honeycomb uses new indexing and storage software to make it easier and quicker to search and retrieve files in large storage systems. “It’s giving users an ability to Google their data,” said James Whitemore, senior director of network storage marketing at Sun.The final configuration has yet to be determined, but Sun has built one 3U “shelf” that contains four Opteron server nodes, each with four 400GB ATA drives. Honeycomb software indexes data, essentially building a massive distributed database of information about the files. Honeycomb appliances can be networked together, giving users a way to index and search as much as a petabyte of storage. Sun claims this approach is more efficient and easier than RAID products.The appliance will likely compete with EMC’s Centera devices and Hewlett-Packard’s Reference Information Storage System, said Stanley Zaffos, research director at Gartner. One major difference is that Honeycomb users will increase capacity by adding server nodes rather than individual disks, he said.Honeycomb is six months away from being unveiled. Technology Industry