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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."
Heat output from all those drives is a concern, but if you look at the photo on the ponytailed hippie's blog, you can see that the box has 20 fans in the front and probably more in the back. Makes you wonder what the thrust-to-weight ratio is. This box is going to make a screaming database server. 2GB/sec throughput to the internal disk beats anything out there, -and- the customer doesn't need to invest in SAN hardware to do it.
28 seasons of Star Trek + all the movies = 250GB.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
If you liked the concept of the e450, you'll like this box.
If you are interested in storage consolidation and increasing utilization while reducing storage islands. This isn't for you.
With 48disks, you'll want protection... all implemented in software raid. So you do raid-5, probably create raid groups of 12 disks? 8 disks? as the number of disks in the raid group goes down, the amount of disk you waste on parity, and the amount of CPU cycles done on calculating parity goes up.
As the industry moves to FC boot and iSCSI boot to alleviate the need to stock disk drives from 15 different vendors, this is an interesting idea for those who don't want to have a raid array. But in most shops, huge internal storage is sooooo '90s.
How do you replicate this beast? VeritasVolume Replicator. Serverless backup? Nope.