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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".
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
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.