Sun Storage 7000: Ease of Use
I've had lots of questions in response to my blog yesterday on the new
Sun Storage 7000 unified storage systems. One category of questions was around the ease of use of the new Sun Storage 7000. Perhaps my best response to that would be to quote one of our early customers (sorry, still in the process of getting permission to use their name),
"We were able to do in 10 minutes with the Sun Storage 7000 what had taken weeks to do with [unnamed network storage vendor] (and their consultants)."
Here are some screen shots that describe exactly what that customer was talking about.
If you don't want to wait for your
free trial system to arrive, you can download our
Unified Storage System Simulator which will run in a virtual machine on your PC or laptop and let you try out the ease of use of the software for yourself. Or if you just want to read more, start with the
Rethink Storage white paper.
And if all the above doesn't keep you busy enough, head over to the Fishworks blog which will tell you everything you want to know about the Sun Storage 7000 and how it came to be.
I'm puzzled by the recent product launch, specifically by the 7110.
One of the benefits that the SSD/HDD hybrid seems to provide is that you can combine high capacity (cheap) HDDs with a small amount of SSD to give you a high performing, high capacity system. The thing is that the 7110 doesn't seem to have any SSD component, it is instead using 10k RPM SAS HDDs.
Why not ship the 7110 with SATA HDDs in most of the slots and a couple of SSDs in the others. That should be able to give you far higher capacity with similar overall performance at lower cost. You could ship a 7TB system by replacing 12 of the SAS drives with SATA, leaving two 2.5" slots for SSDs.
[ In the UK a 146GB 2.5" SAS drive is twice the cost of a 500GB 2.5" SATA drive. Swapping out 12 SAS for SATA would save enough money to buy the 2 SSDs required, delivering the 7TB system for the same cost as the current 2TB configuration. ]
Posted by Phillip Fayers on November 12, 2008 at 02:14 AM PST #
Phillip,
Thanks for your comment. The initial Sun Storage 7000 line contains three products, the 7110, the 7210, and the 7410, each of which have different price points with varying capacity and performance. There are a number of design tradeoffs that go into any product and as noted the SSDs/Hybrid Storage Pools are available starting with the 7210 family. As is noted here,
http://www.sun.com/storage/flash/products.jsp
we have many additional servers that will be available soon with enterprise flash technology and I expect we will release additional products in the Sun Storage 7000 line in the future addressing different price, performance, and capacity points.
Posted by Marc Hamilton on November 12, 2008 at 09:25 AM PST #