Georg Edelmann's Weblog Georg's Weblog

In the run-up to yesterday's Sun Storage 7000 (aka AmberRoad) launch, I had the opportunity to brief a series of our key ISVs on our vision, plans and key features of AmberRoad. I wanted to write up some of the observations, comments and feedback we encountered. There were two distinct categories of ISVs. First, the type of ISVs that adds to the AmberRoad ecosystem as a storage device. Think along the lines of ISVs offering backup software or anti-virus scanning engines. And then there was the category of ISVs who use NAS devices as a data store. The discussion with both type was distinctly different.

Let me start with some common reactions from the ISVs. In no particular order, this is the feedback we received.

Presented with the vision of building storage appliances from industry-standard hardware components, OpenSolaris and open-source software, the most common reactions was that it's about time that all the innovation happening in server land is being transplanted into the storage world by a major IT vendor. The time for closed, proprietary storage devices has come and gone.

All ISVs, and especially the ones that consume a lot of storage themselves, homed in on the possibilities of the analytics capabilities can offer them to figure out performance issues. One ISV commented that their customer's approach to solving performance problem was to buy more storage. Let's agree to call this a sledgehammer approach, not really viable in these tough times. The dtrace-based analytics of AmberRoad opens up the possibility to finally determine the root causes of performance issues with a scalpel.

By far the biggest applause we got from our ISVs was for the decision to not license data services features separately in AmberRoad, and to include all software features with the purchase of the product. Find out what they are by installing the "Sun Unified Storage Simulator". As they say, who reads spec sheets if you can find out for yourself using the real thing. This also means that customers and ISVs don't have the hassle of managing license keys. Neither do we.

More often than not and mostly half way through the briefing, the questions of "can we run our application directly on AmberRoad" came up with predictable reliability. After all, AmberRoad is running OpenSolaris, a general purpose operating system. So, why not run applications on the storage device ? Interesting question. From a technical perspective, this should be possible. However, at this point of the AmberRoad lifecycle, we do not support ISV applications running directly on AmberRoad. We'll see what the future brings here.

We also had some more critical comments, along the lines of Sun's success with the first attempt in the NAS market with the Sun Storage 5000 family. How is Sun Storage 7000 different ? I guess the answer here is that AmberRoad is a vastly different approach. Amber Road is based on industry-standard server technology with a storage personality. Sun can build on decade of experience gained by engineering server hardware and an enterprise class operating system.

Another question that popped up was as to whether we are just copying what Openfiler does. My answer to this question was "Yes" and "No". Yes, in the sense of Openfiler's vision of using a general purpose operating system for a storage device. No, in the sense of that AmberRoad is a fully integrated hardware and software (FISH) stack backed by a major IT vendor.

A more technical questions from the backup vendors was as to whether we support NDMP. The answer is yes. For all software features of AmberRoad, please refer to slide 14 of this presentation.

When the discussion drifted towards performance, the most common reaction was ... dare I say it ... disbelief. How can Sun claim superior performance if AmberRoad is entirely based on commodity parts ? Well, let's leave this discussion for another blog entry. It you can't wait, start exploring the the AmberRoad performance page.

Without exception, ISVs saw the great potential of AmberRoad. All of them were keen to get their hands on a system.

Feel free to leave any comments, especially if you are an ISV and are interested in Sun Storage 7000.