News

posted on 09 July 2008 08:01

Sun has announced an upgraded X4500 Thumper hybrid storage/server, the X4540 with doubled CPU power and quadrupled memory. It has also launched a J4000 drive array subsystem line of JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Disks).

(Thumper is no rabbit.) The 4U 48 HDD X4540 is Thumper with a brain transplant. The dual core AMD CPU is now a quad core and the memory has doubled. A PCIe bus replaces the PCI bus. The original X4500 continues alongside its new big brother although it will eventually be replaced by it.

Sun reiterates the Thumper market story saying the X4540 is for web 2.0 and HPC-style computing, citing one customer whose storage needs are growing at 2TB a day. Thumper can meet those needs whilst collapsing separate management of server, storage area network (SAN) and storage resources into one role, this saving lifetime management costs. It offers, Sun says, the industry's highest storage density and 30-50 percent in power and cooling savings at one-half the price versus traditional storage.

The company has intimated it will enter the JBOD market for some and has now done so with a 3-product J4000 line-up, saying it offers a tenfold saving over traditional storage arrays. These JBODs leverage Thumper design ideas.

The J4200 is the entry-level model being a 2U x 12 drive offering with both SAS and SATA 3.5-inch drives available and expandable to 46 drives (4 trays). It has dual I/O modules for hardware redundancy.

The J4400 is a 4U x 24 drive enclosure, again with both SAS and SATA drives available. It has up to six SAS ports, two I/O modules and can scale up to 192 drives by linking 8 trays together,

The J4500 is the highest capacity product with a 4U x 48 SATA drive tray, dual I/O modules and up to 4 SAS ports. Linking ten together provides the maximum 480 drive capacity, which is 48TB with 1TB SATA drives.

Sun is also introducing a SAS RAID HBA (host bus adapter) to provide connectivity to the J4000 products.

The company claims that the J4000 family offers up to two times the storage density, three times the connectivity, two times the availability and up to 10 times more available capacity than traditional low end storage products. This new family offers customers a very cost-effective $3,000 starting price and breakthrough pricing below $1 per GB for bulk storage applications.

It says the industry-leading high density with up to twelve drives per rack unit saves rack space.

Ray Austin, group manager for storage product marketing in Sun, said: "These are building blocks for open storage to help enable customers to save substantial sums of money ... when combined with Open Solaris." By combining J4000 JBODS with Open Solaris and ZFS, customers can build network-attached storage (NAS) or an iSCSI block-level SAN arrays for a fraction of the cost of proprietary NAS and iSCSI storage arrays. Sun's JBODS will also work with Windows and Linux servers.

When used with OpenSolaris and Sun server, the company says storage costs are reduced by up to 90 percent. Customers can freely mix and match components and re-use hardware by adding new software as their business needs change.

Sun reckons the market for its open storage is growing with the total market expected to surpass $10 billion by 2010. The low-end storage market is growing at a CAGR of almost 23 percent over the next three years, driven by the flexibility and low acquisition and ownership costs presented by open source software running on general purpose storage systems and arrays.

The J4200 has a starting US list price of $3,000 for 500GB capacity. The J4400 $8,500 for about 6TB and the J4500 $28,000 (US list price) for around 24TB. The Sun Fire X4500 storage server family starts at $22,000 and is available this month.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}