Sun Microsystems is pushing into the storage market, supported by the release of a range of hardware and software products designed for managing and connecting storage appliances on the network.

One of the company's first announcements will be the StorEdge T3 Array, otherwise known as Purple, which is a network-attached storage appliance housing disk drives with a third of a terabyte capacity. Sun said the appliances could be linked to provide up to 88 terabytes.

Sun will also release software to manage local network storage and other tools for remote data management featuring capabilities to cater for sudden downtime.

The Purple boxes are available now and Sun said the StorEdge Network Data Replicator software would be available in the next few months.

Sun is also planning to offer a service to monitor storage networks over a secure connection. The scheme, called Remote Services, will locate and fix network problems.

Although Sun will be facing strong competition from traditional rulers of the storage territory, such as EMC, analysts said there is still room for more competitors with few vendors in today's market.

According to analyst Aberdeen Group, the storage market is set to grow to $46bn (£28.75m) by 2004.

David Hill, an analyst at the Aberdeen Group, said that the storage arena was a business opportunity for everybody. "Companies such as Sun Microsystems are very anxious to focus on the storage business as well as on their server business," he added.