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.

[darkjedi521]

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).

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

[chrisj_0]

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".

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.

Sun's storage strategy

[thanasakis]

Considering that they've purchased MySQL, StorageTec and Cluster File Systems (of Lustre fame), developed ZFS, implemented CIFS in OpenSolaris from scratch (not Samba based), participated in NFSv4 and constructed the thumper, these machines hardly come as a surprise.

For the last two years, almost all their moves are targeted towards one goal: Enter the storage market from a non-conventional angle. They want to do it unconventionally, because they know that storage more than anything else is becoming The commodity and today's toys won't cut it. Plus, at this point, all the mainstream storage vendors have difficulty tapping the low end. They may be able to sell their expensive products to clients with deep pockets, but for small businesses it's a different story. No to mention that they are unwilling to reinvent themselves. OTOH with all these inventions Sun may be trying to do what it did with workstations when it started in the 80s, start low and increase. Remains to be seen whether they can pull it.

For the love of FSM...

[More_Cowbell]

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?

Re:Sun replace RAID with RAID

[Purity Of Essence]

"Sun replace RAID with RAID"

No, they replaced it with "RAD"; they took the "I" right out of it.

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.