Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems

Sun recently unveiled their new storage appliance family, code-named Amber Road, the rack-mounted 7000 series. It consists of three models; 7110 Iwashi (2TB capacity); 7210 Fugu (up to 44TB capacity); and Toro 7410 (up to 288TB capacity). It runs on a software code-named FishWorks. We have some serious sushi maniacs back in the Engineering department of Sun. How about some Chinese food names in their next products?

Sun Storage 7000 Hardware
The Sun Storage 7210 and 7410 uses mix memory technologies, DRAM, flash-based SSDs and hard disk drives. The entry-level 7110 appliance includes only the hard disk drives. Data reads and writes are done via solid-sate drives for high-performance bandwidth, with the actual data then moved to and from the lower-cost SATA drives.

Sun Storage 7000 Software
It uses open-source ZFS file system and DTrace system analysis tool. ZFS will eliminate the use of RAID arrays, RAID controllers and volume management software. DTrace Analytics, allows customers to monitor which storage units are doing the most work, what format is being used, which applications are using the storage and which users are using it.

The storage came with comprehensive software lists includes snapshots/cloning, restores, mirroring, optional RAID-5, optional RAID-6, replication, active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, HTTP/FTP and WebDAV. The 7210 and 7420 also features Sun’s “self healing management” tool.

Promising Technology?
What is so different with this storage appliance? Storage appliance defined as hardware preloaded with single-purpose software. It also takes less than 5 minutes for installation and provisioning, Sun claims. They also called this unified storage systems. Doesn’t all this sound familiar? Yeah, we heard it some 10 years ago from Network Appliance (now known as NetApp) about appliances, unified storage and 5 minutes installation?

The differences however are the integration of flash-based memory right into their storage subsystem. This is totally very bold and advanced approach. Other storage vendors like HP and IBM are using SSDs on their servers as a boot device; while EMC is offering SSDs as plug-in replacement for hard-disk drives. Could this open the market of replacing high-performance hard disk drives with SSDs?

Sun Storage 7000 Specifications and Price
The Sun Storage 7110 comes configured with 16 x 146GB SAS hard drives and 8GB memory. Sun Storage 7210 can be configured with one or two 18-GB SSD, up to 46 1TB SATA HDDs and either 32GB or 64GB memory. Sun Storage 7410 can be configured with up to 16 x 18GB write-optimized SSD, up to 6 x 100GB read-optimized SSDs, up to 288 x 1TB SATA HDDs and up to 128GB memory.

The Sun Storage 7110 is priced at $10,995 for 2TB, the Sun Storage 7210 starts at US$34,995 for 11.5T, and the Sun Storage 7410 single-node version starts at US$57,490 for 12TB, while the cluster version, with two server nodes, starts at US$89,490 for 12TB.

Sun Micro Retrenches
On a side note, Sun had plans to cut 5,000 to 6,000 employees, roughly 15% to 18% of its global work force. This move is in respond to the economic slump, where Sun reported a US$1.68 billion lost in its fiscal first quarter ended in September. Sun shares have nose-dived 77% this year to around US$4, a 13-year low.


Finally, can the Sun’s new storage appliance save the day? Will this technology be compelling? We’ll see, we’ll see………….

Comments are welcome.

** FishWorks – Fully Integrated Software and Hardware Works
** DRAM – Dynamic Random Access Memory
** SSD – Solid-state drives
** ZFS - Zettabyte File System
** CIFS – Common Internet File System
** NFS – Network File System
** WebDAV – Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning

Fusion-IO.... are they the next big thing?

Fusion-IO is here but can they revolutionized the storage market? Their product named ioDrive is a PCI-E X4 (PCI Express) cards with NAND flash chips on it. This is a great technology as the disks is now closer to the CPU processor, where the traditional HBA sits in. Don't you already feel excited about it?

Traditional Architecture
CPU -> PCI-E Bus -> SCSI/SATA HBA -> Raid Controller -> Disks

Fusion-IO Architecture
CPU -> PCI-E Bus -> ioDrive


SSD itself is a great technology, it has no moving parts, no spinning drive heads, no noise and produce very little heat. But......

SSD has a lifespan, SSD can wears out. According to Fusion ioDrive specsheet, 80GB model have wear levelling of 24 years, 160GB model have wear levelling of 48 years and 320GB model have wear levelling of 16 years. It currently also only supports RHEL, SLES and Windows. The ioDrive is also NOT BOOTABLE device.

Well, at least Fusion IO has a great start. I am keeping my eyes on this company.

Comments are welcome.