Sun is expected to announce this week that it will discontinue development of its Virtual Storage Manager Open product.
According to sources, Sun will notify customers on Monday that the open systems virtual tape library product they have been waiting on for two years, will not be available.
Sun acquired the VSM Open from StorageTek. It's VSM product for mainframe environments is currently shipping.
VSM Open was Sun's competition to virtual tape products from Diligent, EMC and Sepaton.
Sources indicate that the VSM Open development team will be notified that they will be laid off on August 3.
When Sun acquired StorageTek last summer, the company said its motivation was to be able to court 100 of IBM's largest accounts. Many of those customers deploy VSM for their MVS mainframe environments.
"It's the sales force, heterogeneous support, the [IBM] mainframe accounts, the whole set of relationships that make the transaction valuable," said Mark Canepa, former executive vice president of Sun's Data Management Group, in an interview last year.