Sun unveils open-source storage line
Sun Microsystems unveiled Monday its Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems line, as it seeks to turn around its ailing business by once again turning to open source.
The Sun 7410 storage array.
(Credit: Sun Microsystems)The Sun Storage 7000 line, formerly known as "Amber Road," is intended to bolster the company's storage business by adding open source to its hardware, in a move to make it easier for customers to install and configure the systems and reduce costs. The line will be part of the company's Unified Storage Systems.
Sun's three open-source storage are designed to increase the performance while lower cooling requirements via Sun's Solaris Zettabyte file system (ZFS). These are the new model:
• Sun Storage 7110: Ultra compact model with 2 terabytes (TB) of storage. Pricing is expected to begin at $10,000.
• Sun Storage 7210: Midrange storage featuring up to 48 TB of storage capacity in a four-unit form factor; includes support for write-optimized solid-state disks that use Sun's Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology. Pricing begins at $34,995.
• Sun Storage 7410: Highly configurable storage system with support for up to a half-petabyte of capacity that includes support for read- and write-optimized solid-state drives and the Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology. Pricing begins at $57,490 for a single-node version (12 TB)
These systems are also available in clustered configurations. The clustered 12TB version is expected to begin at $89,490.
Dawn Kawamoto covers enterprise security and financial news relating to technology for CNET News. E-mail Dawn. 
I don't know how Sun can survive with that kind of pricing.
That single 1 Terabyte hard drive from your local store may provide around 150-200 Input/Output operations (I/Os) per second while that storage array in the article uses several smaller disks that produce 150-300 I/O's each. When hard drives are used in concert this way, they can produce thousands of I/Os which is needed in the data center where a product like this will serve possibly hundreds of simultaneous users.
Your single hard drive while being cheaper, could never handle this kind of load.
Imagine driving your car and dropping off 16 friends at different places versus having 16 cars and having each person go their own way.
Also, smaller drives are generally used in arrays because when one eventually fails, the array will rebuild much faster with smaller drives than with larger ones.
In other words, the first poster has all the misconceptions of anyone whose computing experience is all at the personal level and who has no concept of what goes into an enterprise-ready system.
(A Cessna Skyhawk and a Boeing 777 may each, on occasion, carry two pilots and two passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The Boeing will cost a heck of a lot more. That doesn't mean it's overpriced. Most folks get this, because they've been exposed to both types of aircraft and get the difference. It would do many people a world of good to get similar exposure to the computing equivalent of a Boeing, at least before posting in public.)
There are RAID 5, 10, 21 hardware and/or software controllers with cache that cost less than $500 to couple together over 5TB to serve the web. You can add solid state disk but that's a bit costly right now.
If they are talking about 2TB worth of solid state disk, ok, i give them props, but hard drive, *blah*. Open up the server system, you'll see it's the same hard disks u buy at department store ... no not Bestbuy because they rip people off.
- by dudeunderabridge November 17, 2008 6:04 AM PST
- The difference is in the software, check out the features you get for 11k, which I am sure is actually lower as they discount everything at the time of sale... I did some digging around and could not find the same features for less than 20k anywhere....
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