Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

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

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:

• Storage Stop
• Management Monogatari
• Bob Porras 
• QuickStick 
• Analyze This
• Georg's Weblog
• 数据管理
  

Posted at 01:48PM Feb 28, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]

Sun breaks World Record - but where's EMC???

Well, the Sun StorageTek 9990V disk system just posted the fastest Storage Performance Council (SPC-1) benchmark in enterprise datacenter history at 200,245.73 IOPS... (SPC-1 simulates the random I/O workloads required to support typical database, OLTP or email server applications)

I do have to say, however, that I brought this up to a colleague of mine who quickly refuted me saying, "but EMC wasn't in the benchmark, so are we really the world's fastest?"

My answer was yes - if someone doesn't show up to a title fight, then they don't get the title.  Why didn't EMC show up to the contest?  You can Google the answer to hear claims like "benchmarks don't translate to real world performance" or that "there is no good independent performance metric for storage."

But the real irony is that EMC is an active participant in SPEC for their NAS products.  So, my question is - why doesn't EMC publish how they test the performance of their systems like Symmetrix?

You see, even if EMC is not a part of the SPC (yet!) - we would like to see them publish how they test their systems performance.  You see, the value in SPC is not only in the benchmark and its results - but the fact that customers can see exactly HOW these systems were tested.  Putting the power of knowledge where it should be - in the hands of the customer.   

So the above vendors and SPC deserve credit for supporting a great philosophy - "free and open exchange of ideas and information to ensure fair and vigorous competition between vendors as a means of improving the products and services available to the general public."  (See About SPC)

In free and open idea exchange, customers win.  They need good, fair competition - and if you are a customer, would you rather make your purchase on information from a vendor spec sheet or a vendor-neutral independent auditor? 

So, congratulations to the Sun StorageTek 9990V (also sold as Hitachi Universal Storage Platform and HP StorageWorks XP24000) for being the fastest monolithic enterprise disk array on the planet!

But also keep in mind that it's not only the fastest - it also offers storage virtualization and thin provisioning so customer's get more utilization out of their products while protecting their infrastructure investments...a pretty good deal if you ask me. 

 
SPC Disclosure statement  
Systems Compared: Sun StorageTek 9990V, IBM DS8300 Turbo, Fujitsu ETERNUS 1100
SPC-1 Submission Identifiers: A00055, A00049,  A00053
SPC-1 IOPS(tm): 200,245.75, 123,033.40, 115,090.06
SPC-1 Price-Performance(tm): $17.31, $18.99, $16.12
Total ASU Capacities GB: 26,000.00, 9,103.36, 10,854.40
Data Protection Level: Mirroring
Total Prices: $3,466,309, $2,336,626, $1,855,100

Posted at 05:27PM Oct 02, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[5]

If SL8500 were an iPod...

...it could store 14 billion songs!

We get asked for "fun or interesting facts" about the Storage Market and our Products quite often.  Facts that can be used in Presos, as ice breakers, or simply show how fast data is growing.  So, I thought I'd share some "Fun Storage Facts" we found: 

• 5 TBs of new digital content is created, stored or replicated every second! 
• Just 1 Sun StorageTek SL8500 can backup all original TV Programming for 1 Year...773 times?!?!
  
• The Sun StorageTek 9900 can store more than 1.7 million digital photos
  
• The ST5320 NAS appliance can store 18 million e-mails
  
• It is faster to send a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by sailboat, than by the internet
• Or how about this...~12 exabytes of archived data reside on Sun StorageTek solutions (disk and tape). If this amount of data was stored on all EMC disk, it would consume 11.5 billion KWH/year - enough to power the entire city of San Jose!

Data Sources: IDC's The Expanding Digital Universe, Sun StorageTek, EMC, Wikibon, Freeman Reports, Horison Information Strategies, Moving a Petabyte of Data

 Find more facts inside Sun on our internal Wiki: (http://wikihome.sfbay.sun.com/Storage-Intelligence/)

Posted at 11:08AM Sep 18, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

"man it feels good to win"

Sun midrange disk grew 38.6% in revenue Y/Y - and this quote came from an internal e-mail from a Sun Storage Product Director (not surprisingly...)

The number came from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker results for Q1 CY07 (released two days ago).

I have to give credit to the midrange disk storage team - over the past year they have focused on driving customer value through clear value propositions, vertically focused solutions and training sales and customers on how to benefit from our disk systems.   (It also doesn't hurt to have a product that is the world record holder for the SPC-2 price/performance benchmark - hmmm, why aren't EMC products on this list?)

Some highlights from IDC's report:

• We showed our 5th straight quarter of Y/Y revenue growth in overall disk systems, growing 7.4%
• Our midrange disk (classified by Sun as systems priced between $15K - $300K) grew 38.6% in revenue - this is our Sun StorageTek 6000 family, and specifically, the 6540 did very well
• Sun retained the #1 Worldwide position in UNIX disk units shipped - for the for the 14th consecutive quarter (And seeing how Horison Information Strategies reports that today, 47% of the world's data is generated by a UNIX OS - this isn't a bad position to hold...)
  

Posted at 10:58AM Jun 08, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

Tape's Dead? Heard that one before...

This article was e-mailed around Sun Storage just the other day: And tape walked quietly from the spotlight (applause)

I worked for a founder of StorageTek who said he first heard the "Tape is Dead" argument in 1987.  I understand the argument, especially with disk prices dropping, recent VTL growth and the entrance of data de-duplication.

But I don't agree with it - it's far too short sided, and usually the person saying it has not done their homework. The best approach is not to pit Tape vs. Disk - they should be used together to accomplish storage goals.  Makes perfect sense to me.  To see why certain vendors like pitching "Tape is Dead" articles - see Randy Chalfant's Blog.       

But to those who say tape will be exiting the data center, we have this to say: Tape's value proposition remains maturity, longevity, volumetric density, declining costs, removeability and scalability (and this is from someone who supports tape AND disk systems at Sun). 

But for those still pitting Tape vs. Disk, I'll put forth these comparisons calculated by our disk analyst Bruce Norikane and tape analyst Chris Ilg (calculations made from public website info and do not include software costs):

Which solution would you recommend for a petabyte archive?

 
To further illustrate this point:

• According to Freeman Report's Whitepaper, "The Growing Importance of Archive"...37.1% of all archived data reside on Sun StorageTek solutions
• This equals 11.924 exabytes (to be exact)
• Storing just 1 exabyte of data on EMC's Symmetrix DMX-3 disk array consumes around .97 billion kilowatt hours (KWH) per year (according to their website)
  
• So, if 11.924 exabytes of data were stored on EMC disk:
  • It would consume 11.5 billion KWH per year (enough to power the city of San Jose)
  • This would cost over $1B ($1,488,000 to be exact)
  • And you would have to burn 3,768,885 tons of coal per year to generate enough power

An insider's view: For my last point, I'd like to share an insider's view as to how a vendor can use market data to tell a story they want to tell. (credit goes to Chris Ilg for this great insight)  This is particularly relevant to the "Tape is Dead" presentations lingering out there.  Take a look at the below graphic from a customer presentation.  Both charts are based on IDC data - but the first chart is one you would see from a disk-only vendor, telling you that disk is converging on tape costs.  The second chart is closer to reality - the rate of price erosion for disk and tape is about the same.  The only difference in charts is the scale, the X axis - the first chart gives an absolute view, the second a relative view.  

 
So, as long as we need to store more data at lower system and power costs - Tape (along with cheap disk) has a life. 

Lastly, I love Randy Chalfant's take on Sun's approach to the disk vs. tape debate posted in his blog linked above: 

 "Part of our approach to this, is to lead with a business value
assessment, where we can look at the operational needs and practices of
you business, and then map the technology into a supporting foundation
for the demands of your business."

You can't do that if you don't have tape and disk (not to mention software, services and servers) in your portfolio...
 

^{(Note: If you are a Sun employee, you can find more in the Market Fact Book section on our Storage Intelligence Wiki)}  

------- Update --------

Another disk-only salesman brings up the old argument, see:

• Marc Farley's blog & video:  Is tape dead? What do you use it for? 
  
• StorageStop picks it up at: Tape is dead, long live tape
  

Posted at 03:57PM May 30, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]