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

Variable redundancy?

[Jerk City Troll]

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.

ZFS

[XNormal]

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.

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

[oogbla]

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.

Re:24TB for $70k (Sun) or 24TB for $16k (generic)

[illumin8]

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.