 related to the ms acquisition of xdegrees URL sun nabs storage startup by clint boulton amid the flurry of news at its own sunnetwork NUMBER conference in san francisco sun microsystems thursday said it has agreed to purchase data storage concern pirus networks for an undisclosed amount of stock the palo alto calif networking firm bought the acton mass based startup with a keen eye for the startup s switching define devices and virtualization technology used as part of a storage area network define virtualization is the pooling of storage from many network storage devices into what appears to the operating system to be a single storage device that is managed from a central console though major vendors make similar technology pirus competes with the likes of rhapsody networks and confluence networks sun plucked pirus after scouting some NUMBER companies mark lovington vice president of marketing for pirus told URL that pirus and sun have been in discussion for a while about a possible acquisition pirus he said succeeded in a goal it shares with a lot of storage startups to be acquired by one of the major systems vendors such as sun ibm hp hitachi this is a huge opportunity for pirus in a storage market dominated by NUMBER NUMBER or NUMBER system level players lovington said sun sees this acquisition as a critical element to their nNUMBER initiative the synergies were quite obvious nNUMBER is sun s hopeful tour de force in distributed computing define architecture which involves multiple remote computers that each have a role in a computation problem or information processing nNUMBER is being styled as the answer for companies looking to manage groups of computers and networks as a single system at a lower cost and with greater flexibility while lagging behind other more entrenched players sun is gaining ground in the storage market with its sun storedge complete storage solutions according to a new report by idc john mcarthur group vice president of idc s storage program said sun microsystems and ibm posted the largest increases in total storage revenue over qNUMBER NUMBER with NUMBER and NUMBER gains respectively as of qNUMBER sun held a NUMBER percent market share with revenues of NUMBER million sun s acquisition of pirus is expected to close in the second quarter of sun s NUMBER fiscal year which ends december NUMBER NUMBER 