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]

Yes, that'll look nice out the back of the rack. How many cables?

Well, the whole reason you'd be dealing with 3x larger was to make them all internal. And, depending on your arrangement, probably 16 total. If you're willing to deal with external enclosures, you can knock the whole thing down to 5U. Besides, take a look in a datacenter some time. You'll find the average machine has a dozen or more cables sticking out of it.

put silicone glue in for the inner rails You have a lot of spare time.

It takes like five seconds per screw. To knock $48k down to about $5k, yeah, I've got a few minutes. Bet you would too.

Er, speed is one of Solaris' big selling points, if you'd actually look before announcing. Well, I worked at Sun for 7 years and know a few things about Solaris. If you think Solaris is fast at NFS compared to NetApp, well I beg to differ.

I'm glad to know you're a former Sun engineer; otherwise my reply would be long-winded and probably seem condescending. Basically, the issue here isn't one of OS speed. The issue is of disk speed. The reason ZFS is near-platter speed is that almost all of the work is amortized into the write phase; it's a ridiculously read-focussed scheme, which is appropriate in the rare situations where it's deployed.

Granted that Solaris itself isn't the speed champion it once was, the throttlepoint is the disk subsystem, not the OS/CPU. Sure, if you're doing heavy simulation or something else machine-intensive, that might be a problem. But, in context it seems like we're talking about a data store, and the situations in which a data store has significant non-disk responsibilities are vanishingly rare.

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

Yes, I spent two years explaining and demonstrating it to customers. It's a huge change and takes a big mindset change for those who are used to Vxvm or other LVMs.

Well, my apologies; I had not previously realized your familiarity. That said, I'm not sure why that mindset change would come in, specifically from the perspective of an external data store. Perhaps you could enlighten me? Realizing your former position, I now wonder whether I'm missing something, or whether I just took for granted something customers often don't understand.

At least spell "privilege" right in your nit-picking.

I deserved that. Touché.

Also, if we're going to have a "sense of scale" here, there is a huge cost difference between 12 RU and 4 RU in datacenter costs.

Well, yes and no. 4U goes for $50/mo these days from a place like ColoPronto (it may be cheaper elsewhere - I haven't looked in a long time.) So, sure, you're looking at an extra $100/mo. On the other hand, the Thumper fully built out is $48k, whereas the equivalent machine stitched together is about $11k. So, you're looking at about a $37k difference, which at $100/mo is almost 30 years of datacenter rental to break positive.

I'm not saying the Thumper isn't worth it - it damned well is, and Sun isn't stupid. They wouldn't price it up there if it wasn't worth that. The reason isn't the cost of rental, though. The issue is paying the time for someone to put stuff together, to maintain stuff, to handle keeping the machines playing well together, all that jazz. For the little guy (and let's not kid ourselves, that means startups, and startups need these things too,) the Thumper isn't the right way to go. Too much cost up-front, and all the startup kids are dramatically underpaid anyway, so getting them to maintain the box is just cost effective.

That said, that's not Sun's customer base; those kids are usually using BSD or Loonix instead. Sun's customer base are corporations who need the datacenter today or they lose $12k/day. Sun's customer base are people who don't have time to screw with making the server work, because