Sun Unveils Thumper Data Storage

zdzichu writes "At today's press conference, Sun Microsystems is showing off a few new systems. One of them is the Sun Fire x4500, known previously under the 'Thumper' codename. It's a compact dual Opteron rack server, 4U high, packed with 48 SATA-II drives. Yes, when standard for 4U server is four to eight hard disks, Thumper delivers forty-eight HDDs with 24 TB of raw storage. And it will double within the year, when 1TB drives will be sold. More information is also available at Jonathan Schwartz's blog."

Comments

Re:Indeed, Sun's list prices are way too high

[stonecypher]

Where are you going to find a $1000 chassis that fits 48 drives?

A 3U chassis that handles 11 drives is currently $140 on PriceWatch. Do the math.

As far as I know (and could be wrong) SATA is not an external bus

And, in fact, you are. First hit for external SATA. Rule of thumb: when saying something you don't actually know, it is no longer appropriate to say "I could be wrong." Now, you just check. By the by, I own a SIIG SATA card with both internal and external plugs. It cost me a whopping $45 at Fry's.

The SATA cards you mentioned would have to run outside of the box to another unless you find that 48 drive chassis I mentioned.

Never run a datacenter, have we?

There are limitations to the SATA cabling you're not taking into account.

Yeah, cabling arbitrary lengths of drives together has been easy since SCSI2 Fast Ultrawide. What you do is use seperate cables every few drives. Magic.

Also add a couple more power supplies on here for each of the boxes that hold you drives.

Depending on the drives, you can expect 48 drives to cost between 600-700 watts. There are 1000w power supplies sitting in your local CompUSA right now.

Cooling is also an issue that tier 1 vendors model very seriously before they put together a kit.

Cooling is a problem for CPUs primarily, not drives. Cooling large blocks of drives is relatively easy.

Most home baked kits have either dangerous hotspots that effect reliability or are overcooled which wastes money.

1) Affect, not effect.
2) Cooling a 48-drive box is going to cost less electricity than running a single CPU. These people put down a thousand bucks a month just for the privelege of being in a controlled room. Let's have a sense of scale for things, please: fans just aren't that much power.

You should also keep your drives mounted with dampening to avoid vibrations from each other which can cause early drive failure.

Wow, so you get wide mountings, and put silicone glue in for the inner rails. That's gonna cost like two dollars in caulking and maybe ten in rails and screws. Next?

There's more to this than simply buying parts.

Not really.

The problem with using it for NAS storage is that Solaris has historically been pretty slow compared to NetApp.

Er, speed is one of Solaris' big selling points, if you'd actually look before announcing.

ZFS could improve the score here with simplified administration if anyone actually understood how it worked.

Yeah, uh, ZFS takes like five minutes to set up. It's trivially simple. Why would you pretend otherwise? Have you even touched it?