Taylor's Take on Sun Storage
My storage team and I focus on three of the most important aspects in any industry: customers, competitors and market trends. There is insight to gain and share in this role, so here is our take on Sun and Storage - Taylor Allis
Sun's Open Archive Announcement
If you've been walking the halls of Sun StorageTek of late, you would have heard a lot of talk about the "Archive Launch" and changing IT and storage economics...
Today, Sun made a large announcement in the Archive storage space.
First a word on messaging: Internally, Sun Systems recently went through a healthy reality check on how we message our products and solutions. We looked at where we are in the industry and where we can, and should, differentiate. It's no secret that Sun's core assets reside at the infrastructure level - storage, servers, processors, O/S. These segments are the backbone of IT infrastructure - on which applications are deployed to meet business requirements and goals. We have come to a single conclusion in which today's (and tomorrow's) messaging will focus on - the Economics of IT needs to change. With data sprawl, longer retention periods and a paradigm shift happening in how data is generated (more and more by individuals) - traditional IT infrastructures are becoming too expensive or too inflexible...
What we announced today: So, you will hear an overall message of changing Economics through open IT architectures and infrastructures coming from Sun. And you will hear us announce categories of the market in which we aim to change the economics in- today's happens to be archive. What we announced:
- Brand new product: Sun StorageTek SL3000 Tape Library
- New product to existing family: Sun StorageTek T9840D Tape Drives
- Product enhancements: Sun Crypto Key Management System (KMS) 2.0 & Sun Customer Ready Infinite Archive System (aka Sun CIS)
- Open sourced digital archive: We donated the source code for the Sun StorageTek 5800 (aka HoneyComb)
Since I have personal experience with the SL3000 library and CIS - I'll paint some color on these products and their history :
Sun StorageTek SL3000 Tape Library:
10x the power savings and 50% footprint advantage vs. Quantum & IBM 
First of all, there has been plenty of FUD thrown around about Sun's commitment to Tape after the StorageTek merger. Nothing shows more vendor commitment than developing and launching a new product in that space - and we've announced two today. In this Eco-focused world, tape becomes more relevant - not less. Data sitting on a tape cartridge consumes 0 power and gives off 0 carbon emissions after all - tough to argue those numbers. So Sun brings a full storage portfolio to the archive space - customers can leverage the performance of disk AND the economics of tape.
How the SL3000 came to be was a Product Manager's dream: A) We saw a gap in our tape portfolio between entry and enterprise libraries; B) we did extensive customer research and focus groups to get customer requirements; C) we flew customers in to see and comment on the prototype D) we announce it today.
No sloppy welds: My team was fortunate enough to conduct the research for SL3000. When we were in Asia focus groups, customers told us something that took us by surprise. Our customers would actually look at the inside edges of a tape library to see how it was welded together. If the weld was "sloppy" - put together hastily - they'd notice. In a culture of quality - the little stuff is an indicator of overall quality. Suffice to say, we've been poking our heads inside libraries looking for sloppy welds ever since. A good indication on how customer feedback drove this product to market (and our quality focus at Sun StorageTek).
Some quick stats on the library itself:
- SL3000 scales from around 200TB to 3PB (200 - 3,000 slots)
- Supports open and mainframe environments and mixed media
- Fully redundant robotics & non-disruptive capacity upgrades
- Up to 10x power savings and 50% footprint advantage vs. Quantum Scalar i2000 and IBM TS3500 (Economics!)
Sun Customer Ready Infinite Archive System (aka CIS)
Costs 46% less and consumes 1/3 the power of a 2PB EMC Centera Solution
Skunk Works? I just learned that the origin of the term "Skunk Works" came from Lockheed Martin when they were developing one of my favorite WWII fighter planes - the P-38 Lightning. In tech, Skunk Works can have positive and negative connotations - I personally think a lot of innovation has come from working around the process, but you need a healthy balance. Sun's X4500 (aka Thumper) came straight from engineering and by all measures its turning out to be a huge success. I'm supporting a Skunk Works project in fact, and I'd love to see it get off the ground one of these days (perhaps more in a later blog, but its open source Systems Managed Storage software brought out of the mainframe world into open systems, available over SourceForge). 
So while SL3000 has its origins in traditional product management, CIS (er... "Customer Ready Infinite Archive System") got its origins more on the Skunk Works side of the house - from the Field Sales and Engineering side specifically. I don't know the full story, but I am guessing it went something like this....a Sun systems engineer is at a customer site deploying a tiered storage architecture (disk, tape, server, HSM) for the umpteenth time and thinks, "what if we did this integration BEFORE we shipped this to customers???" And CIS was born (or something like that...)
Call it a tiered storage platform, or ILM-in-a box, or whatever - but this is what it is (and it can be used for more than just archive btw):
- Pre-configured and integrated
- Server, Disk & Tape in a single rack
- Sun X4200 or T5220 Server
- Sun StorageTek 2540 SAS or SATA disk
- Sun StorageTek SL500 Tape Library, supports LTO-4 tape drives
- Comes with HSM software (SAM) - fully automated backup and data migration
- Highly scalable - scales to petabytes by stringing multiple racks together under a single file system (QFS)
- Ready to run - just hook it up to the network - cool stuff...
So, since we are talking archive, we compared this integrated architecture to another popular archive appliance in the market. In a 2PB configuration, Sun's Customer Ready Infinite Archive System costs 46% less and consumes 1/3 the power of a 2PB EMC Centera solution. Additionally, data migration cost extra for Centera customers while it comes part of Sun's solution.
So, the industry is looking at IT economics closer than it ever has before. Sun is innovating here at the infrastructure level - adding functionality and performance while reducing cost through open source software, integrated systems, Eco-efficient hardware and leveraging the economics of tape...
---- Update ---
Other Sun blogs discussing Open Archive:
Posted at 01:48PM Feb 28, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[1]
Today's Page Hits: 82
Posted by inflexible on February 28, 2008 at 10:00 PM MST #