November 12, 2008 Sun Microsystems has introduced the first products in its Unified Storage System line-up with the promise of breakthrough diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities, optimized performance, one-fourth the energy consumption, simple installation and configuration in under five minutes and up to 75% cost savings compared to competing storage systems.
The initial release is made up of three products in Sun’s Storage 7000 family, which is also known as “Amber Road.” Sun says the units are designed for organizations of all sizes and across multiples industries that are struggling to keep pace with today's rapid data growth and storage management complexity.
The Sun Storage 7110, 7210 and 7410 are designed to overcome the problems of traditional storage products that are expensive, time consuming to install and lack the embedded real-time capabilities to troubleshoot complex networked storage issues and cost effectively analyze system performance. Each of the units include a fully-integrated software stack with support for a variety of operating environments; standard high speed networking and tape connectivity and comprehensive management software with powerful analytics tools. These systems are also the only storage systems that fully exploit Flash Hybrid Storage Pools within Solaris ZFS to automatically accelerate and optimize performance while lowering power and cooling requirements.
Instead of adopting the standard industry model that charges per individual storage features, all Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems include data services such as snap/clone, restore, mirroring, RAID-5, RAID-6, replication, active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, HTTP/FTP and WebDAV at no extra cost. Their design also enables the units to benefit from new data services and features as they become available through automated updates included in each system.
The Sun Storage 7000 family features DTrace based analytics, which delivers real-time observability of an entire storage system in production to allow customers to rapidly diagnose, troubleshoot and resolve issues before they impact the business. What's more, real time visibility from the CPU to a user helps to ensure performance and health analytics quicker.
The Systems also utilize Flash Hybrid Storage Pools, which uses the 128-bit ZFS file system to transparently manage DRAM, read-optimized Flash devices and low-cost, low-power disk drives as a single caching hierarchy. They also promise greater performance than traditional storage systems at significantly lower power consumption and reduced cost per gigabyte. Hybrid Storage Pools are then used to store data for file and block protocols, like CIFS and NFS, and can deliver enterprise data services, including clustering and data replication.
Sun has also highlighted its aim to “be the most open technology company in the world” by sharing many of the new technologies featured in the products with open communities, such as OpenSolaris.org. In conjunction with the launch of the Sun Storage 7000 family, Sun also announced a new Open Storage Partner Specialty Program and a series of new professional services to help customers take advantage of Open Storage technologies.
Making up the range is the Sun Storage 7110 – an ultra compact model with 2TB of storage, the Sun Storage 7210 – for mid-range storage featuring up to 48 TB of storage capacity in a dense four unit form factor, including support for write-optimized solid state disks (SSDs), and the Sun Storage 7410 – a highly configurable storage system with support for up to a half petabyte (PB) of capacity that includes support for read and write optimized SSDs. The systems are also available in clustered configurations for added high availability.
The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System begins at USD$10,995 for the Sun Storage 7110. The 7210 version starts at US$34,995 and the Sun Storage 7410 starts at $57,490 for a single node version (12 TB) and $89,490 for a clustered 12TB configuration.
For further info visit Sun Microsystems.
