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]