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.

[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.

[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).

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.

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.