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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."
That's the Bambi Cooling Add-On system.
This device is very interesting. It is poised to slash costs in data centers. It consumes less space, uses less power, costs $2/gig, and is managed just like any other server. Instead of calling it a data storage device, they should be marketing it as "DAS UBER SERVER!"
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Could you please put the link to your stupid website in your sig, so those of us who are uninterested don't need to read it a dozen times in every story? KTHX...
So 24TB of storage servers otherwise doesn't generate heat?
Put doors on the rack and chimney the damn thing. Use plastic wrap if you have to. Ain't nothing any data center doesn't do for blades anyway. Drives just don't generate the amount of heat you think they do tho.
It would be nice if the system had a setting where you could transparently specify a redundancy factor in sacrifice of capasity. For example, I could set a ratio of 1:3 where each bit is stored on three separate disks. This ratio could increase to the number of disks in the system. And of course, little red lights appear on failed disks, at which point you simply swap it out and everything operates as if nothing happened (duH). Sure, we have a degree of this already, but managing redundant arrays is still a very manual process and when we start talking about tens or soon hundreds of terabytes, increased automation becomes a necessity.
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This fits nicely with Sun's new ZFS file system.
ZFS blurs the traditional boundaries between volume management, RAID and file systems. All disks are added into one big pool that can be carved out into either the native ZFS filesystem format or virtual volumes that can be formatted as other filesystem formats. It has many other interesting features like instantaneous snapshots and copy-on-write clones.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I nominate "Star Trek Collections" as a new unit of storage measurement! Quick, somebody work out the conversion into the standard libraries' of congress.
The enemies of Democracy are
Sure, but if you're ordering many (ie in 10's), you're paying $47,099.50 a piece. Still more expensive tough. But as I understand it you also get the entire rack as well (no clue how cheap that is though).
Also, the one you're linking to is a 7U unit, whereas Sun's is a 4U unit. IOW you can mount I think 6 units from Rackmount or 10 units from Sun, for 144 TB/rack vs 240 TB/rack. (That's with a 42U rack, which I believe is standard).
I won't get into anything wrt servicability, management etc., as I've absolutely no clue about that, nor do I know what clustering is like and bla bla bla.
The point is that while Sun's offering is more expensive/GB, it's also a lot more compact.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Of couse it is software RAID. Every single last RAID is software. OK you might think there is such thing as hardware raid but if you look at the controller card you will find some kind of computer and some RAID software running on it. The only difference is that the software is burned into ROM on the card. If you buy this RAID system from sun you will never see the dual Operon or have need to know what software runs on it. You should think of these two Operons are a very, very powerful controller card.
I can tell you, from first-hand experience, that only one who has too much time on his/her hands, or doesn't actually work for a company where data-operations are critical would propose such a thing. I built just such a dula-opteron/high-density storage white-box that I run ... and it is a *nightmare* of unreliability, etc. Yeah, it was dirt cheap, and yeah, time is money, but my time is worth more than this ...
So you're keeping those disks in a bucket and cooling them with slave-girl driven fans or something?
I think you're missing one thing. Where would all the drives go? On the floor? Suspended in mid-air? I'd like to see you get a Chassis+PSU+rails for $1000 that holds not only your Opteron motherboard, but all 48 disks as well. Plus, with that many drives, cooling, a *real* power supply is required (at 15W per drive, that's 720W right there, plus the Opterons, memory, fans, etc. and you're talking about 1100W - not your average power supply).
Another problem is vibration. If you don't have a good mounting scheme for all these disks, cross-drive vibrational issues will adversly affect not only performance, but MTBF as well.
Lastly, what about performance? I've seen this machine sustain raw access to the disks at 3GB/s.
That's *bytes*. Through the filesystem (ZFS), you get close to 2GB/s if you're careful. The machine has 10 fully-independant PCI busses inside - not a bottleneck in sight. Let's see the PCI bridge of your $500 mobo take that.
Once you do all of this, you're not $1/GB anymore, you don't fit in 4RU anymore, and you certainly
won't get the same performance. So I think that to build a similar box, there's no way you can
significantly beat the price. Plus, you have to remember that almost nobody pays Sun's list price.
Most VARs that sell Sun gear will give you a good discount. Comparing Sun list price to We-won't-be-here-next-week computers is not a valid comparison, either.
Just curious how you are going to hook up those 48 SATA drives to your 6 8-port SATA hbas? Where are you going to find a $1000 chassis that fits 48 drives? In one MAINTAINABLE configuration? As far as I know (and could be wrong) SATA is not an external bus. The SATA cards you mentioned would have to run outside of the box to another unless you find that 48 drive chassis I mentioned. Even if you ran a long enough wire to get to the other box mounted above your standard opteron 1U box, there's a lot of slack that has to be on that connection unless you want to disconnect everything just to pull the server out of the rack for maintenance. There are limitations to the SATA cabling you're not taking into account. Also add a couple more power supplies on here for each of the boxes that hold you drives. Cooling is also an issue that tier 1 vendors model very seriously before they put together a kit. Most home baked kits have either dangerous hotspots that effect reliability or are overcooled which wastes money. You should also keep your drives mounted with dampening to avoid vibrations from each other which can cause early drive failure.
There's more to this than simply buying parts. This appears to be another viable option in the storage arena for apps that need very large local storage. The problem with using it for NAS storage is that Solaris has historically been pretty slow compared to NetApp. ZFS could improve the score here with simplified administration if anyone actually understood how it worked.
My $.02
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Instead, we've been using these. Very good cooling:
Unfortunately, with a generic motherboard and an off-the-shelf SATA RAID controller, good luck fixing the thing when a drive fails. What's that? The RAID controller is reporting a bad drive, but you have no idea which drive it is because there's no way to light it up without shutting down the server and going into the RAID controller BIOS and telling it to flash the drive light?
Tough luck. There is a reason why Sun is a little more expensive: RAS. RAS is Sun's main hardware principle. It stands for Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability. Sun hardware is truly built with these concepts in mind. Concepts like: A failed component should trigger a visible alert (warning light), as well as a human readable syslog message that calls out the exact part that failed. You will never see these things in a self-built beige box without some serious hardware hacking on your own, and at that point, you might as well hire a team of EEs to reinvent the wheel.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
i'd rather take an extra week of vacation than pay an extra $10K for Sun stickers on Seagate hard drives.
Sun software on the other hand (Solaris) I tend to have very little respect for. It works and works well, but is clunky and very outdated IMHO.
...
Linux is no-where near the heavy lifting capabilites of Solaris 10. Just because bash isn't installed as the default root shell does not make Solaris outdated.
It doesn't wear the lipstick or the new hot mini-skirt that linux flashes .. but it certainly can do the job in day and night over and over, sideways and whichever ways and still be willing to service more ..
You've gotta be kidding me or you are the kind that thinks my embraer EJ-145 gets me from SFO to Dallas (because thats what your realm activities are limited to) and you can do your job so all the Boeing 747s or Airbus 300 are overatted in your IMHO