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."

Comments

Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[AKAImBatman]

Pricing:
Sun Storage 7110: $10,995 for 2TB;
Sun Storage 7210 starts at $34,995 for 11.5TB;
Sun Storage 7410: Single node version starts at $57,490 for 12TB;
cluster version (with two server nodes) starts at $89,490 for 12TB.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't charging enterprise prices for simplified hardware that relies on commodity software solutions, kind of defeat the point?

Unless I'm misunderstanding this hardware, the entire idea is to move data safety away from hardware redundancy toward software-driven duplication. In that way, the data is safe from failure in the same way that GoogleFS protects against individual machine failures. The only difference is that Google probably doesn't pay $11,000 for 2TB of storage. :-/

One of these days, I really will understand why Sun regularly shoots themselves in the foot. Until then, I suppose I must trust them to somehow find a customer who's willing to pay exorbitant prices for an otherwise good idea. (i.e. I'd really love to see Sun bring Google-style reliability from unreliability to the market.)

BTW, here's the link to Sun's marketing on this:
http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/index.jsp

It's actually pretty cool tech. Sun could own the market if they just understood how the market views pricing and features.

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Archangel Michael]

I could build a setup that would be way more powerful and less costly and more storage for way less.

What kind of drugs are these people on? two TB for 10K ???? ARE YOU NUTS SUN????

I could probably build this using SSD for less. SHEESH

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[AKAImBatman]

the hardware to drive 48 SATA drives and not saturate the bus still isn't cheap.

If you're driving 48 SATA drives on one bus, you're:

A) Not looking at the minimum 11.5TB layout
B) Not paying $35,000
C) Not a small-business customer

Which brings me back to: Sun is promising to target the small business and yet totally missed the mark. This is Enterprise hardware.

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[rainer_d]

I don't think it's that expensive.
I use Promise's VtrakJ610s at work (16x1TB SATA), and it cost about half that - but I still need a server for it (DL385 in our case). And I need to fit the disks myself (16x4 countersunk screws...) into the ultra-cheap harddrive containers.
A MSA70 full of SAS-disks (25) costs 10k, IIRC - but you need a server, HBAs etc.
I'm soooooo sick of the "I could build one for XXX% less using YYY"-comments.
Please, all the winers: go and start your own company selling and supporting storage-systems.
Good night and good luck....

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Famanoran]

With the same level of assurance that the solution will operate, first time - every time?

With the same level of confidence that Some Vendor will bend over backwards to fix it if it doesn't work?

Will your solution be as well tested and engineered?

It's not like you can just grab 3 1TB SATA drives, throw them into RAID-5 and say that you've got 2TB of production ready storage. Well, you can, but you'd be an idiot.

Your "home brew" solution will not meet any of the objectives Sun are achieving with this product. Your spindle count will suck, so concurrent access will be slow. You will probably be limited to one of iSCSI, CIFS, NFS or WebDAV, I doubt your solution would have all - and if it does, the integration will suck.

Will your solution have the diagnostic tools that Sun can provide? Oh wait, you don't have the millions of dollars to invest in engineering quality diagnostics, right from disk analysis (Sector scanning, remapping, etc) through to performance related faults? Well, then your solution will suck. What about snap-cloning?

In short, yes - storage is cheap. You can grab large drives very cheaply and put together something that works. That does not mean it will be good. Production quality storage is expensive, and for good bloody reason.

As for doing this using SSD storage, that's just ridiculous. 2048GB of storage would be at least 16 128GB SSD disks - this is not counting any disks for redundancy (i.e, raid-5/6 parity), or hot-spares. Assuming 2 drives for RAID-6 parity and 2 hot swaps, you'd need 20 SSD disks - with 10 grand, you're expecting to pay $500 per disk - and no other hardware, i.e, motherboard, case, cooling (more important than you think), etc.

So, until you have a clue about designing production quality storage systems, please refrain from making statements you have no clue about, you're only serving to confuse those people who are actually interested in what this product has to offer them. Keep to building crappy 3 or 4 disk RAID-5 systems using extremely large drives for storing your music, movies and pr0n on, but don't ever ever ever ever think about using those in any situation where your financial livelihood depends on that data.

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[edsousa]

You all must be on drugs.. DRAM, SSD & HDD. You got all the software you will ever need. 75% less energy than same capacity solutions.
Do you ever use an EMC Clariion? Did you check those insane prices? The CX4-120 costs around $4000 and the software for 1 user another $4000 (prices vary)
The folks at Sun are not stupid, specially when it is HPC.
And BTW, storage space isn't the most important thing. Have you ever wondered why Google keeps offering more space for GMail? They need huge amounts of IOPS (Input/Output operations Per Second) and the standard way is adding more and more HDDs.
Or Sun style, using an approach that I will consider when my enterprise starts.

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Fweeky]

You forgot the SSD's for ZFS secondary ARC cache. Oh, and the server.

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Godji]

the entire idea is to move data safety away from hardware redundancy toward software-driven duplication

You are exactly right. When you pay the exorbitant price, you pay for great hardware, the development of great software (which you could have gotten for free), the convenience of a prepackaged solution, and for the hardware and software support.

Should anything happen to these machines, you can always get your data back. If you can't afford another set of machines like these, simply plug the drives into anything that runs Solaris (or generally ZFS), and you have your data.

Just because it's open doesn't mean it has to be cheap. But Solaris is open source, so if you don't like these, roll your own and support it yourself.

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Fweeky]

• Sun X4240, cheap from third party reseller not necessarily in the best of configurations: ~£2700.
• 2 cheap and cheerful SSD's for ARC second level cache: £300. £1200 if you want ones with decent write performance.
• 14*146GB 2.5" 10kRPM SAS disks: £2100.

Even if you put it together and test it using slave labour, you're not getting much change from $11k.

Sure, you could just plonk three 1.5T Seagates in there, shove a RAIDZ over it and call it a day, and that would be fine for some uses, but it's not really something you buy a storage appliance for, is it?

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Thundersnatch]

You, sir, are never allowed anywhere near my data centers!

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Hyppy]

People avoid SATA in high-IO environments for a reason.

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Kent Recal]

Well, that's a nice little department file server that you specced out there.
Sun targets a *slightly* different market with their device (think: databases, mission critical, pink slips).

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Score Whore]

Nice. How's the replication work on that rig you just built? And how many IOPS you getting? And how quickly will your vendor bring replacement hardware to you? How many filesystem snapshots can you take with your fancy ICH9 supporting linux? You gonna back that up over NDMP? How's the thin provisioning working out for you there? How much data you pushing through those two slots? Where's the other 2 gig ethernet ports. You got hot swappable power supplies there? After you're done stuffing all that gear onto your mobo, how many pcie slots you got left for future growth?

No offense, but try and get some clue as to what it takes to have a commodity class storage appliance.

Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know.

[Fweeky]

the bottom line is you need redundancy - and that's pretty much it.

Um, well, good for you if that's all you need, and Sun will surely be happy to sell you something appropriate for that too, but for some of us, we kind of need that 2TB to do more than 300 IOPS.

RAID-Less how???

[mkcmkc]

• It doesn't use Redundant storage?
• The storage isn't an Array? (Meaning what? That it's composed of non-uniform parts?)
• It's not Inexpensive?
• It's not Disk-based?

The third one I believe--the rest I'm skeptical about...

Re:RAID-Less how???

[TheRaven64]

It's redundant, it's an array, and it contains disks, but with 140GB SAS disks, inexpensive is definitely not an adjective that applies. It's a RAEP solution, which sounds like it's probably illegal.

Re:Looks great.. but

[E-Lad]

Yes yes yes, you can do that with just $1000 and a afternoon at Fry's or browsing Newegg, right?

Everyone's missing the point here, and a lot of what is being said could be applied (just as wrongly) to NetApp... after all, those are just x86 boxes running a BSD kernel.

The special sauce here is not so much the underlying OpenSolaris OS (which does provid the IO and services such as CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, data replication, and so on) but the Fishworks software put on top of it. Built-in failover clustering, the integrated web GUI and CLI... if you weren't paying attention to the console during boot, you might not even have a clue that's it's OpenSolaris underneath... which is one of the marks of a good appliance OS... easy to manage and the idiosyncrasies of the underlying OS is sufficiently abstracted away.

You don't need to be a Solaris admin to use this, just like you don't need to know about BSD to run a NetApp. The difference here is that this takes pretty high-end x86 hardware and does better than NetApp, for cheap. Ever see a support contract for any of the NetApp filers? I guarantee you'll spin a 180 on your heals and pretend you never saw the number.

Re:For the love of FSM...

[QuasiEvil]

I hate to say it, but for the small business market, they should be compared. If you're selling a 2TB redundant storage device to a small business without a huge IT department, then you're competing against what can be built from commodity parts (aka, crap from Newegg + Linux + RAID) because often cost, not performance, is the defining factor.

Hate to be the one to tell you all this...

[Giant Electronic Bra]

But SUN is FAR from being the inventor of charging people $50k for something they could just as well get for free...

Name ANY big IT vendor, they all do it. My father can tell some amazing stories on that subject. Not a new phenomenon either.

Now, if you are the GOVERNMENT, they'll give you the special bonus public sector price, $150k!!!

You're missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

This is meant to be 100x faster than the storage you're talking about:
First: This uses Hybrid Storage Pool:
The Hybrid Storage Pool combines DRAM, SSDs, and HDDs in the same system, dramatically reducing bottlenecks and providing breakthrough speed.
Second: The system's hybrid architecture gives you the speed and performance you need to shatter the I/O bottlenecks with no administrator intervention. In fact, Hybrid Storage Pools with SSDs can improve I/O performance by 100x compared to mechanical disk drives.

small business

[Anonymous Coward]

Small Businesses are businesses that make under $25M/year by definition.

the company I work at (multinational semiconductor business) has just been degraded to "small business" by you.

You insensitive clod.

(AC, for obvious reasons)