Analysis

posted on 29 February 2008 16:37

For StorageTek storage was a peripheral thing you attached to a host server or to a SAN. For Sun storage is different. Storage is a storage medium plus a server or servers plus an open source software stack. Such storage products are a systems business and not a peripherals business. The prime example is the X4500 super-NAS (network-attached storage) system with lots of servers and lots of storage.

A prime example of the older or classic peripheral storage model is a StorageTek BladeStore drive array or any other Sun drive array.

Once upon a time StorageTek, in pre-Sun days, invented the idea of information lifecycle management or ILM. The idea is that as stored data ages it becomes less valuable (in terms of access frequency) and so doesn't need to be stored on fast disk; it can be moved to slower, cheaper disk and then to slower, even cheaper tape. As well all know EMC stole the ILM concept as a marketing term but the StorageTek people kept on plugging away.

Their day in the sun has come with the not-so-snappily-named SCRIAS, standing for the Sun Customer-Ready Infinite Archive System. By customer-ready Sun means its a plug-in-and-use product rather than an archive platform that needs additional software layered on top before it becomes usable. That is the EMC Centera model and, ironicaly, it is also the X4500 model as that NAS road-rocket needs application software, such as GreenPlum's data warehousing SW, layered on top of it.

SCRIAS has three tiers of storage in a single rack, all managed and presented through Sun's SAM, Storage Archive Manager, and its hierarchical file system. This ILM-in-a-rack product is actually four Sun products in a pre-tested bundle:-

1. Sun Fire T2000 server with 9 a Sun 6140 array of 6TB of Fibre Channel (FC) disk and functioning as tier 1 storage, which Sun calls online storage and also a disk cache. It runs Solaris and provides the system's processor horsepower as well.

2. Sun 6140 disk array with 32-64TB of serial ATA (SATA) or SAS disk functioning as tier 2, which Sun calls a midline archive and also a disk archive.

3. A StorageTek SL500 tape library with 30-100 LTO3 slots and 79-230TB capacity, functioning as tier 3, which Sun calls a nearline archive and also a tape archive.

4. Sun SAM-FS and QFS software with a SAM Client for Windows to enable data migration, replication and file-buy-file recovery. It provides fully-automated data backup and migration inside the integrated product. The QFS software means that many of these devices can be connected together to take the overall archive into the petabyte area.

An entry-level configuration leaves out the midline archive layer and a large configuration bulks the thing out enough to need two racks and two SL500s.

Now let's note that Sun recently donated its Honeycomb (StorageTek 5800) disk archive software to the open source movement. The SAM-FS software will cost you $25,000. 

SCRIAS is a nice integrated bundle of existing Sun products but it is not in the current mainstream of Sun's storage systems hardware and software development. That is to produce unique and differentiated Sun hardware products running open source software. SCRIAS is peripheral to that.

There is no de-duplication in SCRIAS so the 'infinite archive' tag looks a little hollow. By de-duplicating the midline disk tier its capacity could be increased by five to twenty times but, I would imagine, such de-duplicated data couldn't be stored on the tape archive thus preventing its use.

There is no mention of compliance suitability or of e-discovery or of e-mail archiving features, limiting, I would suppose, the product's applicability in those areas. There is no mention of encryption, limiting the product's suitability as a store for sensitive data. There is no mention of any content indexing or search implying that this is a file-based acess system and not particularly suited to applications such as e-discovery.

What comes through perhaps, is that this is a system for a relatively specific or self-contained archive application, such as a medical images or PACS one. However it could be more general purpose than that.

Sun compared the costs of a 2PB SCRIAS to a 2PB Centera and found SCRIAS cost slightly less than half a Centera and only used a third of the power. Those are impressive numbers but, I daresay, Centera would deliver data to inquirers faster as all of its data is stored on disk and not divided between disk and tape. Set against that is that data migration for Centera costs additional money whereas it is included as part of the SCRIAS software.

A Sun blogger, Taylor Allis, says that SCRIAS is the result of a field service, sales and engineering skunk works project and not a full-blown formal product development from Sun's system division. That chimes in with the nature of the product and how it differs from things like the X4500.