StorEcology
Someone just asked me to highlight the storage messages from the Sun Eco Innovation Initiative. I thought it sounded like a great blog (decide for yourself!) ...
We believe that Sun Storage differentiates itself in the Eco area around three things:
- A balanced approach to storage
- Building better products
- Being part of the Sun Systems family.
Let's take them one by one.
A Balanced Approach
In a world where customers want to use as little power and cooling as they can – you can't get better than $0. That's fundamentally the cost of keeping a piece of data on a piece of tape. Given we can store over 70,000 1TB tapes in a SL8500 library, it's great on space too. Clearly you have to use power to read, write and move the tapes – but you get the point.
A possible problem with this approach is that you may want some data faster than you can read it from a tape drive. It is interesting to note that Sun has a unique product in the tape market called the 9840 that's designed for fast access – so we give you capacity and speed. Where millisecond access is required, disk is king. Sometimes it's very fast enterprise type disk, like our ST9990V, and sometimes it's SATA type performance, like our ST6000 family of modular storage.
In between disk and tape is virtual tape – whether it is for the mainframe, with our VSM, or for open systems, with our VTL solutions. What's interesting about our VSM and VTL solutions, unlike most of the competition, it's not about eliminating tape, it's about optimizing price performance and Eco through a tiered storage architecture.
Building Better Products
The balanced approach is vital but it is not enough. We have to be able to help our customers with better products at every stage. I am not going to use this blog to make a competitive point-by-point argument for each of our products but here are three eco-examples:
- Our new low-end VTL-V solutions, based on a X4500 (aka Thumper) with Solaris and ZFS, uses 60% less power and 66% less space than EMC's DL210
- In terms of power alone, the SL8500 is 57% more “Power Efficient” than the IBM TS3500
- If value for watt is an issue, in $/W/GB the ST6540 is twice the value of the IBM DS4800 (which are built from some of the same parts)
The 6540 example is an important one because it makes the point that Sun has been thinking about this for sometime. Both the ST6540 and the DS4800 have the same LSI controller in them and probably even use some of the same disks – but we packaged it very differently. So not only will the ST6540 win price and performance benchmarks but Eco ones too.
Another set of considerations are functions like 'thin provisioning' – announced on our ST9990V. Using this technique, customer can increase the utilization of their enterprise disk solutions from under 40% to over 60% - for some from under 30% to over 70%. Doubling utilization can mean you need to buy less boxes, which means less power, less heat, less people to manage, etc.
Keeping It in the Family
Finally, it is about being part of a systems company.
More and more customers buy solutions, i.e. combinations of servers, software and storage, to solve specific business problems – they are not just buying for their infrastructure. In Sun the Systems, Software, Storage and Services teams work together to make sure we can put the best solutions into the hands of our customers. From High Performance Computing to running your ERP systems – we design Eco in, not tack it on afterwards.
Together at Last
So, put these three reasons together and you don't just have a good Eco story – you may just have the best story in the industry.
Posted at 09:43AM Sep 13, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[0]
Getting Thin for the Fall – Twice the Utilization at No Extra Cost!
Often I am asked what our 'virtualization strategy' is. Like it should be one product or one solution. The reality is that we all have the same strategy – to help customers mask the complexity of managing multiple instances and increase the utilization of the assets, at the same time. For Sun Storage this means – disk virtualization, tape virtualization and with our partners, fabric based virtualization.
It's worth remembering that Sun has an incredible portfolio of virtualization across Systems and Software – which combined with the Storage really provides an unparalleled solution design. It is also very Eco friendly – more in the next blog.
We have just added another part to our disk virtualization portfolio - the Sun StorageTek 9985V system. Like its bigger sibling the ST9990V , the ST9985V has the ability to virtualize multiple storage devices from all vendors and present them to the application as a single pool of resources. It also has the ability to let the application see more storage than actually exists on the physical disks within the system.
So what?
In the past, the number one priority was to ensure that the application had access to enough storage - no matter what. This meant that data center managers had to allocate extra capacity in case there was a spike in demand for the application, and to ensure that there was enough space for all the data copies needed for business continuity or to recover from a disaster. In addition, adding storage when a new application was deployed lead to lots of storage devices that had to be managed independently, that couldn't access each other's resources, and that all had a lot of overhead. There had to be a better way.
Technologies such as the virtualization and thin provisioning capabilities in the ST9985V can help alleviate this inefficiency by giving all devices the same management interface and by reducing the amount of physical capacity required to support the application. More importantly, these technologies can help data center managers move towards a tiered storage architecture where data is stored on a device according to a pre-assigned value set by the organization. Since both of these considerations change over time, it's important that the tiered architecture have the appropriate tiers (primary disk, secondary disk, virtual tape, tape archive, etc.) and you have the ability to move the data from tier to tier according to policy.
Bottom line: Thin provisioning can increase your disk utilization from under 30% to over 60%. That's more power to your bottom line not your next disk array!
Posted at 09:00AM Sep 10, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[4]
Not Just Being Diligent?
Recently, Sun signed a standard reseller agreement with Diligent, which allows Sun to resell Diligent's ProtecTIER as a field-integrated solution, combining Sun hardware and Diligent software. This has caused some excitement around our partnership with FalconStor and our strategy (which hasn't changed). I thought it was worth explaining what we have done and why.
We've added the Diligent-branded product to our Professional Services 3rd party software price list. This means we can sell Diligent software as part of an integrated Sun solution. In this model, Sun will support its components and Diligent will support its software. We do this with lots of software and it is really designed to support deals in the marketplace.
The Diligent relationship does not change Sun's commitment to its relationship with FalconStor or the current Sun StorageTek-branded VTL roadmap. The Sun VTL roadmap integrates FalconStor base software with Sun software and hardware IP into an end-to-end Sun-tested and manufactured solution. The agreement with Diligent also does not change Sun's commitment to integrate FalconStor's de-duplication software (SIR) into the roadmap which we are working on with FalconStor.
Sun StorageTek VTL has significant differentiation from other VTLs in the market, based on superior testing and integration, integration of tape management capabilities, Sun Solaris operating system, and Sun's server roadmap. Because Sun is the single source for all the components of the solution - software, OS, server, disk, AND tape - Sun is uniquely able to support all components of the solution, resolving all problems with the customer without hand-offs to third parties.
A recent de-dup market study by The 451 Group showed that 28% of non de-dup users planned to buy de-dup in the next 6 months. The Diligent agreement provides Sun with expanded access to market opportunities for de-dup until we have SIR available on our price list and supporting Sun's VTL solution. Diligent's de-dup architecture is 'inline'. FalconStor's approach with SIR is 'post-processing'. The jury is out on which architecture will end up dominating and, as with any emerging market, our enterprise customers will demand a choice.
The Diligent agreement is also in alignment with our strategy to support the applications our customers need. No one would expect us to just support one ERP vendor – why should we just support one storage software vendor? For example, for backup software we work with Veritas, Legato, TSM and BakBone – so is life.
The Diligent agreement is also part of a bigger story to create an application ecosystem around x4500 (aka Thumper). Today we are working with Luminex for mainframe VTL-type solution, Greenplum for data Warehousing, ipConfigure for security/surveillance, etc. The more people who use our x4500 the better!
So in the end it is about choice not about change.
Posted at 02:52PM Sep 05, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[1]