Sun finds HighGround as money floods in

Booming Sun has made it an all-share deal and won't be touching its cash mountain.

Matt Hingley, server analyst at research company IDC, said: "Sun has always been very cautious and has substantial billions on hand."

Hingley added: "About three years ago Sun reorganised its storage division - it didn't see why EMC should be hanging so many boxes on its machines."

HighGround's software works on an open system principle and is used to manage disparate storage boxes across a network. It is particularly good at keeping old or stale information out of the way of mission-critical systems.

In October, Sun said its storage sales were growing in excess of 50 per cent per year worldwide.

Sun today announced the latest version of its clustering software, SunCluster 3.0 and Sun Management Center 3.0, though the software has a distance to go to catch up to its competitors. It can handle up to eight nodes, but the established HP and IBM systems can run to 16 and 32 nodes respectively.