Sun Unveils RAID-Less Storage Appliance 249
pisadinho writes "eWEEK's Chris Preimesberger explains how Sun Microsystems has completely discarded RAID volume management in its new Amber Road storage boxes, released today. Because it uses the Zettabyte File System, the Amber Road has eliminated the use of RAID arrays, RAID controllers and volume management software — meaning that it's very fast and easy to use."
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Informative)
No RAID? (Score:5, Informative)
"All of the new unified storage systems include comprehensive data services at no extra cost, Fowler said. These include snapshots/cloning, restores, mirroring, RAID-5, RAID-6, replication, active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS (Common Internet File System), NFS (Network File System), iSCSI, HTTP/FTP and WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning)."
Note that this system includes "RAID".
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Informative)
What Everyone is Missing (Score:4, Informative)
This system will intelligently move the data around to put frequently accessed bits on the SSDs. This is a lot more than a 2u server with a few TB drives in a raid 10.
Zettabyte? (Score:3, Informative)
ZFS doesn't stand for zettabyte anything. "The name originally stood for "Zettabyte File System", but is now an orphan acronym." from wikipedia, sourced from http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/you_say_zeta_i_say [sun.com] .
and of course "RAID Array" is lovelily redundant phrasing.
For the love of FSM... (Score:5, Informative)
That's not even apples and oranges, it's more like apples and redwoods.
Last I checked Netapp was still charging $10,000 per TB! [dedupecalc.com] Do you really think there is no reason for this?
Re:Looks great.. but (Score:5, Informative)
Will that $600 box be using 14 146 GB 10k RPM SAS disks?
These boxes aren't about providing stupid storage, their about providing massive I/O throughput. The larger boxes scale to 44TB and 576TB respectively. This also automatically moves frequently accessed data to flash drives (and RAM) for even faster I/O.
These are absolutely monstrous compared to anything you could build for $600. There seems to be quite a bit of custom hardware to power this setup.
Re:Looks great.. but (Score:3, Informative)
With that said, linux REALLY needs ZFS , and not in userspace.
Due to deliberate licensing issues we won't have native ZFS in Linux any time soon. However, BtrFS [kernel.org] should be merging into the mainline kernel soon enough (~2.6.29), and it includes most of ZFS's features plus a few of its own: storage pools, checksumming, mutable snapshots, built-in extent-level striping and mirroring, etc. It even supports in-place, reversible conversion from ext3 via a copy-on-write snapshot.
DOWNLOAD THE STORAGE SIMULATOR! (Score:1, Informative)
enough whining by people who really dont know what they are talking about (save those of us who do)
Check out the simulator that Sun built for you to try it in a VMWare instance:
https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_SMI-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductRef=SunStorageSim-1.0-OTH-G-F@CDS-CDS_SMI
Re:look at Sun x4500 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What Everyone is Missing (Score:3, Informative)
Sun rocks.
Real engineering here.
Re:How well does it integrate in a M$ environment? (Score:2, Informative)
It supports active directory, and user mapping between AD and LDAP. The CIFS stack is in-kernel.
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:4, Informative)
Just a comment about the 48 disk setup; it is not always about getting the most space, but often about getting fastest response time. In this case the important factor is the amount of spindles. 11.5TB divided on 48 disks would be ~240GB a disk. Many companies would want 48 70GB disks as they are not in need of more space, only faster response times.
Re:Sun's storage strategy (Score:4, Informative)
Sun CIFS isn't reimplemented from scratch by Sun, it was code they got from their Procom acquisition. It remains to be seen if putting a CIFS server into an otherwise stable kernel is a good idea or not :-).
Jeremy.
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:3, Informative)
For most companies, the "cheap crap" is more than adequate.
They simply don't have the money to spend and they get by
perfectly well despite not having drunk the cool-aid.
Also, overpriced hardware with the label "enterprise"
plastered on it is not going to do anything to prevent
the need for a multiple data centers. Overpriced enterprise
hardware and multiple data centers solve different problems.
Sounds like apples to oranges comparison (Score:4, Informative)
to me. Coming from high performance transaction processing land where an operation means 'the data is ON the platter' you can't do that more often than the platter rotates to the point where the head is over the sector where the write operation starts. Basic math, 15k RPM spindle = roughly 300 times/sec. Multiply by however many spindles you got, that's what you're max throughput is.
This is one reason why IN THEORY at least an SSD would be so great, that latency is much less. So basically I'm thinking they just aren't talking about what you're talking about, and maybe that makes sense, if you're running a trading operation say, you just DO NOT CARE what is buffered someplace, if it isn't physically on the drive, it doesn't exist.
this is not competing with the diy market (Score:5, Informative)
The goal of this product is to compete with Netapp. If you've ever experienced Netapp licensing/pricing, this Sun solution is a bargain. People seem to be forgetting that this is a storage appliance.
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:4, Informative)
Is that 2U 1M IOPS unit racked right next to your 1U, 64K core, 1024 TeraHertz system?
FYI, a loaded HDS 9990V (i.e. hundreds of spindles and multiple gigabytes of cache) manages to provide 200,000 IOPS (SPC-1). Even Texas Memory Systems RamSAN 400 (i.e. SDRAM) can only make 400,000 IOPS. Hell, it was only a couple of weeks ago that TMS was announcing that they sold a RamSAN-5000, which is the only storage device I've ever seen specced to 1,000,000 IOPS. And it's 10 different RAM cached, flash backed units.
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:3, Informative)
12TB (48x250GB) - $21,995.00 [sun.com]
and is virtually identical to the new 7210 box (config with 48x250GB) that sells for $34,995.00. Therefore proving that the same hardware is sold at a 60% markup ! Someone mod the parent up, he laid out the perfect counter-argument to the GP.