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Sun Unveils RAID-Less Storage Appliance
pisadinho writes "eWEEK's Chris Preimesberger explains how Sun Microsystems has completely discarded RAID volume management in its new Amber Road storage boxes, released today. Because it uses the Zettabyte File System, the Amber Road has eliminated the use of RAID arrays, RAID controllers and volume management software — meaning that it's very fast and easy to use."
Some of that is the custom gear that goes into making those beasts. Yes, it might eliminate the hardware raid card, but in the case of the 7210, the hardware to drive 48 SATA drives and not saturate the bus still isn't cheap. Plus hotswap everything, and the price quickly rises to something close to what Sun is charging. I use 4 x4500s at work for a single cluster, and they are a hell of a lot cheaper for that capacity than the traditional rack of fiber arrays/raid controllers/etc. The 4 of them cost me what another vendor wanted for half the raw storage (and far less usable storage).
"All of the new unified storage systems include comprehensive data services at no extra cost, Fowler said. These include snapshots/cloning, restores, mirroring, RAID-5, RAID-6, replication, active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS (Common Internet File System), NFS (Network File System), iSCSI, HTTP/FTP and WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning)."
Note that this system includes "RAID".
I don't think you could get the IOPs (or anywhere near) out of a pair of off the shelf 1u servers that they're advertising. I just checked dells website, their new AX4-5i (iscsi SAN) starts at over $14,000 and that only includes the 4x 750GB vault drives. Add 4x 1TB SATA drives (at $1,100 each) in a RAID 10 and you still wouldn't get the IOPs that Sun is talking about. This product looks to try and take a market share from the FC SAN vendors, not companies that want their in house geek to build a "cluster storage solution".
This system will intelligently move the data around to put frequently accessed bits on the SSDs. This is a lot more than a 2u server with a few TB drives in a raid 10.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
ZFS doesn't stand for zettabyte anything. "The name originally stood for "Zettabyte File System", but is now an orphan acronym." from wikipedia, sourced from http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/you_say_zeta_i_say .
and of course "RAID Array" is lovelily redundant phrasing.
People, please stop trying to compare a couple of drives from Newegg tossed in a chassis as a similar product for thousands less, simply because you have the same storage capacity.
That's not even apples and oranges, it's more like apples and redwoods.
Last I checked Netapp was still charging $10,000 per TB! Do you really think there is no reason for this?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Will that $600 box be using 14 146 GB 10k RPM SAS disks?
These boxes aren't about providing stupid storage, their about providing massive I/O throughput. The larger boxes scale to 44TB and 576TB respectively. This also automatically moves frequently accessed data to flash drives (and RAM) for even faster I/O.
These are absolutely monstrous compared to anything you could build for $600. There seems to be quite a bit of custom hardware to power this setup.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
With that said, linux REALLY needs ZFS , and not in userspace.
Due to deliberate licensing issues we won't have native ZFS in Linux any time soon. However, BtrFS should be merging into the mainline kernel soon enough (~2.6.29), and it includes most of ZFS's features plus a few of its own: storage pools, checksumming, mutable snapshots, built-in extent-level striping and mirroring, etc. It even supports in-place, reversible conversion from ext3 via a copy-on-write snapshot.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
enough whining by people who really dont know what they are talking about (save those of us who do)
Check out the simulator that Sun built for you to try it in a VMWare instance:
https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_SMI-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductRef=SunStorageSim-1.0-OTH-G-F@CDS-CDS_SMI
While it certainly doesn't make up the ~$50k difference on its own, the 7210 _does_ come with 64G of RAM (vs 16G) and a pair of 18G SSDs. They're not completely identical.
It supports active directory, and user mapping between AD and LDAP. The CIFS stack is in-kernel.
Just a comment about the 48 disk setup; it is not always about getting the most space, but often about getting fastest response time. In this case the important factor is the amount of spindles. 11.5TB divided on 48 disks would be ~240GB a disk. Many companies would want 48 70GB disks as they are not in need of more space, only faster response times.
Sun CIFS isn't reimplemented from scratch by Sun, it was code they got from their Procom acquisition. It remains to be seen if putting a CIFS server into an otherwise stable kernel is a good idea or not :-).
Jeremy.
For most companies, the "cheap crap" is more than adequate.
They simply don't have the money to spend and they get by
perfectly well despite not having drunk the cool-aid.
Also, overpriced hardware with the label "enterprise"
plastered on it is not going to do anything to prevent
the need for a multiple data centers. Overpriced enterprise
hardware and multiple data centers solve different problems.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
to me. Coming from high performance transaction processing land where an operation means 'the data is ON the platter' you can't do that more often than the platter rotates to the point where the head is over the sector where the write operation starts. Basic math, 15k RPM spindle = roughly 300 times/sec. Multiply by however many spindles you got, that's what you're max throughput is.
This is one reason why IN THEORY at least an SSD would be so great, that latency is much less. So basically I'm thinking they just aren't talking about what you're talking about, and maybe that makes sense, if you're running a trading operation say, you just DO NOT CARE what is buffered someplace, if it isn't physically on the drive, it doesn't exist.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The goal of this product is to compete with Netapp. If you've ever experienced Netapp licensing/pricing, this Sun solution is a bargain. People seem to be forgetting that this is a storage appliance.
Is that 2U 1M IOPS unit racked right next to your 1U, 64K core, 1024 TeraHertz system?
FYI, a loaded HDS 9990V (i.e. hundreds of spindles and multiple gigabytes of cache) manages to provide 200,000 IOPS (SPC-1). Even Texas Memory Systems RamSAN 400 (i.e. SDRAM) can only make 400,000 IOPS. Hell, it was only a couple of weeks ago that TMS was announcing that they sold a RamSAN-5000, which is the only storage device I've ever seen specced to 1,000,000 IOPS. And it's 10 different RAM cached, flash backed units.
The X4540 is even better to prove your point as it is cheaper than the X4500:
12TB (48x250GB) - $21,995.00
and is virtually identical to the new 7210 box (config with 48x250GB) that sells for $34,995.00. Therefore proving that the same hardware is sold at a 60% markup ! Someone mod the parent up, he laid out the perfect counter-argument to the GP.