Comments on: Sun unveils open-source storage line

The open-source appliances in the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems line are intended to lure price-sensitive customers.

[humanssssss]

$10,000 for 2TB?!? I can go to a local department store to get 1TB hard drive for $200. If I buy 2, it's 2TB for $400. Sun storage server is big too. Not only will I save on the hard drive, I also save on electricity which if run for 2-3 years, can save me in the thousands!!!

I don't know how Sun can survive with that kind of pricing.

[catbutt5]

Since this is a common misconception among newbies allow me to fill clarify.
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.

[Pishkado]

Catbutt5 is correct, but didn't give the whole story. The drive you get at Best Buy won't have even a power supply of any sort, let alone an industrial-strength one. It will have a single slow interface, not multiple fast ones. It will be just a disk drive, not a system capable of handling multiple drives as a coordinated whole.

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.)

[humanssssss]

I'm afraid catbutt5 and pishkado lack the understanding the progress of hard drive and probably never bought a hard drive from a department store lately to understand how much more advanced it is compared to enterprise-ready blah blah system. This is the same camp who used to claim Solaris is way way better than Linux because Solaris is enterprise operating system. Putting a label on something doesn't make it any better.

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.

[idfubar]

humanssssss - perhaps you have the makings of a storage startup?

[dudeunderabridge]

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....