Sun Microsystems has launched a new line of open storage NAS products combining Sun's DAS servers, OpenSolaris ZFS and management features developed to broaden the appeal of open source products and, in the process, make life uncomfortable for vendors reliant on proprietary storage technology.
“Storage is last bastion of proprietary technology,” Sun’s Australasian Chief Technologist, Angus MacDonald, told SearchStorage ANZ yesterday (Monday). “Most other areas of technology have one or two standards. The storage business has the last closed technologies.”
“We [Sun] have spent last couple of years being open with everything and decided it was time to do something about storage.”
The something is a range of three devices that replace the company's 5000 NAS line and may eventually replace the 6000 series.
The 7110, code-named Hiwashi, consists of up to sixteen 3.5-inch SATA drives and 8 GB of memory, and supports Gigabit Ethernet, CIFS, NFS and iSCSI protocols. An entry-level configuration with four disk drives starts at $US10,000.
The 7210, code-named Fugu, supports either 32 GB or 64 GB of RAM, a choice of up to forty-eight 250 GB, 500 GB or 1 TB drives and one or two 18 GB write-biased or read-biased solid-state drives (SSDs) from Stec.
The 7410, code-named Toro, consists of a single- or dual-clustered SunFire X4540 Thumper server in a 4U, 24-drive starting configuration. The 7410 can be expanded by adding up to 12 of the company's Riverwalk J4400 JBODs for a maximum of 288 TB of raw space over two racks. It can support 16 GB, 64 GB or 128 GB of RAM and up to a dozen 18 GB SSDs. A fully configured instance of Toro is estimated at a list price just over $US200,000.
Management software GUI
The new systems are tied together with OpenSolaris, ZFS and a new management software GUI that came out of a product development group at Sun called FishWorks. The GUI bundles snapshots, replication, mirroring, compression, thin provisioning and data placement on SSDs.
The GUI also bundles in real-time performance monitoring features based on DTrace, using Ajax to create dynamic views of I/O according to different time frames or file systems with granularity down to the file level.
The software package is free with each hardware appliance and is the same on all appliances, which means customers can replicate data from one model to another. The easy availability of the software also means that, should customers chose to do so, they could create their own appliances. MacDonald said, however, that customers have indicated a preference for bundled products, hence the launch of the 7000 series.
He added that the new products will initially be aimed at Web 2.0 companies and high performance computing environments, but that the company hopes to learn from their deployments in such applications to broaden their appeal. Working with independent software vendors is another priority, in the hope that they code their applications to take advantage of the new devices’ capabilities.
Sun's success with the 7000 series of NAS appliances may ultimately depend on whether the company can extend its reach far beyond its base of open source software programming enthusiasts. Illuminata analyst John Webster said that might take more time than Sun has, given its current sales slump. "These products seem like a good approach for Sun, and I think it should be given a chance," he said. "But traction takes time, and I'm not sure how much time the market is willing to give them."
IDC analyst Rick Villars was more upbeat in his outlook for Sun. "They've still got work to do," he said. But the wider market looks to be going Sun's way, especially among Web 2.0 and content providers that so far have been building customized systems out of commodity hardware. "These systems," he said, "have the potential to become a building block for an emerging category of data centers."