As I approach my six years at Sun Microsystems, Inc., I have come to realize that I have long been evangelizing a technology and product set that few, both inside and outside of Sun know about, that being host-based data replication. It is not that data replication is an unknown entity, as it is present in most medium to large scale IT centers, it is just that most consider data replication being functionality available within the many storage arrays available from an entire portfolio of storage vendors, including Sun.
I would like to change the perception many have about host based data replication, and the perceived cost of running data services on the server. It has long been known that data services of any type: various levels of RAID, local and remote replication, backup, etc., compete against the very databases and applications on which the server was originally acquired. Previously increasing the performance at the server level was often seen as cost prohibitive, bringing forth the advent of data services within controller based storage, something which hides the performance cost (and $$$ cost) as part of the overall storage controller.
Well times have changed, or as they say "Everything old is new again". Over the past year or so, Sun Microsystems Inc., has released a proliferation of Sun servers with very impressive price / performance numbers, offering record-breaking benchmarks. With the recent release of Sun StorageTek Availability Suite 4.0 for Solaris 10 on both SPARC and x64 platforms, collectively one can realize a significant decrease in the performance cost of adding host-based data services to today's Sun servers.
Taking these ideas one step further, the savings in not purchasing controller-based data services and instead purchasing lower cost host-based data services, would allow one with the same money to buy a better Sun server, with performance available to not only support host-based data services, but when not active, improving overall system responsiveness to existing applications. Taking this to the extreme, purchasing a Sun Fire™ X4500 server, an integration of state of the art server and storage technologies, with up to 24TB in 4U of rack space, by adding host-base data services to this platform, why would one purchasing a storage controller in the fist place?