For customers faced with growing volumes of data and an increasingly complex and heterogeneous storage infrastructure, the Sun StorEdge 9990 system provides an application-oriented solution that matches IT to business requirements, improving efficiencies, simplifying management, increasing return in investment (ROI), and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). The Sun StorEdge 9990 system represents the third generation of the industry-leading Sun StorEdge 9900 series, and it provides the highest levels of performance and availability for large mission-critical environments.The heart of the Sun StorEdge 9990 system is the Hi-Star crossbar switch, which provides levels of storage consolidation previously unattainable in the industry, and enables the virtualization of both internal and external heterogeneous storage in a single storage system. This helps to reduce TCO by enabling connections to multiple hosts, and allows for more flexibility in configuring a storage-area network (SAN) infrastructure.