Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

Honeycomb is sticky sweet (and Open...)

In my last post I illustrated Sun's economic advantage with a system similar to the competition, but consuming 16% less power in 73% less space. (Built from the Sun Fire X4500)

I'm happy to post a recent InfoWorld product review on another Sun product, the ST5800 (aka Honeycomb).  Read it here: Sun's StorageTek Honeycomb is sticky and sweet

Open storage: One thing these two systems have in common is that they are truly "open" storage.  Now there are a lot of different meanings to the term open - so when I use it with storage I primarily think of two items: Industry standard hardware coupled with open source software.  (one could also add open standards to the term). 

Truly open storage systems like the products mentioned above are hitting the storage market.  And for good reason.   Open saves cost - from software licensing fees to the use of volume components.  Open is more flexible - developers can build applications directly in the system itself (which also allows a "product" to be re-built or re-purposed into another "product" as business needs change.)

Web applications: Open storage allows for mass customization as well as massive scalability at economics that make sense for today's "Web 2.0" applications. 

One of the most revealing analyst statistics I have read was from IDC's White Paper titled: The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010.  In it, IDC predicts that 70% of the new digital data (988 exabytes) in the year 2010 will be created by individuals.  But 85% of this data will be managed by enterprises or organizations.   As I write this blog (content generated by me, stored and protected by Sun IT) Technorati cites 112.8 million blogs with 175,000 new blogs added every day...with 1.6 million new posts each day or 18 updates per second! 

Traditional closed storage architectures do well supporting a lot of enterprise IT applications (I  know because Sun sells them).  But new, more open architectures are needed to match the data growth rates and trends the market is currently seeing. 

And that's what Sun is building - and what Honeycomb is.  We launched our open source developer community for storage back in April.  We donated Honeycomb digital content (fixed archiving) code to this community last month.   And now InfoWorld has put this new open storage system to the test. 

Some Honeycomb Review Highlights: 
Honeycomb scored a 9.3 out of 10, with perfect 10s in Reliability and Scalability.  Here was the InfoWorld reviewer, Senior Analyst Mario Apicella's, bottom line:

"...Impressive resilience together with excellent performance and powerful administrative tools make “Honeycomb” one of the most interesting solutions in the emerging fixed-content archiving space. With a foot in the open source community, Honeycomb promises to deliver more software features faster than competing proprietary solutions, and customers that can’t wait have an easy and free alternative with a flexible SDK."

On Honeycomb's differentiation & open architecture:

"Sun has taken a different approach to companion software than vendors such as EMC, Hitachi, and HP, which have married their fixed-content archiving solutions to compliance applications...Sun has not wedded Honeycomb to any specific application, leaving that task to partners and customers. The upside of Honeycomb's openness is that the possibilities are endless. In fact, Honeycomb's powerful, built-in administrative software is complemented by an SDK that allows Java or C developers to define their own metadata schemas consistent with the specifics of their application."

On Honeycomb being a new breed of storage:

"Conventional NAS simply isn't designed for long-term archiving. The typical NAS would choke under the load of storing multiple large objects at the same time, and it would die with its third consecutive drive failure. Honeycomb addresses the performance and resilience requirements of content archiving with a new architecture. Unlike plain NAS solutions -- and fixed-content archiving solutions built on conventional storage systems (think EMC Centera) -- it's made for the job."

Expect more open storage products coming from Sun.  In this new Web 2.0/digital data world,  Sun storage (to quote Mario) will be "made for the job."

Posted at 01:58PM Mar 24, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]