Sun Microsystems expands Open Storage portfolio with new products 10 July, 2008 By Erin Bell

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"Our portfolio of Open Storage platforms has expanded with the addition of Sun's new Sun Storage J4000 family and an addition to our high-performance, high-value Sun Fire X4500 Thumper systems," said John Fowler, Executive VP, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "These new building blocks deliver impressive density and capacity while empowering customers to take advantage of the efficiencies of general purpose storage powered by open source software."

According to Fowler, these solutions will give companies the ability to manage exponential data growth and rising data center costs. Both solutions take advantage of the flexibility and cost-effectiveness provided by open source software running on general-purpose storage systems and arrays.

Starting at $3,140 for the most basic configuration, the J4200 system offers up to 12 drives per tray and up to 46 SAS/SATA drives. The J4400 system offers up to four drives per tray, up to six SAS ports, and up to 192 3.5-inch SAS/SATA drives. The J4500 is a four-rack unit that offers 48 drives per tray, up to four SAS ports, and up to 480 3.5-inch SATA drives.

Sun Microsystems also launched new technology in the Sun StorageTek SAS RAID host bus adapter (HBA), a host-based RAID HBA for Sun servers that allows J4000 series systems to connect directly to servers through one or more high-speed interfaces for scalable external storage expansion. Customers can connect the J4000 systems to Solaris, Linux or Windows operating systems, or deploy them into Open Storage and OpenSolaris environments.

"When you combine these storage systems with Sun's industry-leading servers, the new J4000 family provides highly-scalable cost-effective building blocks that helps create a flexible open-storage infrastructure," said Fowler. "With plans to incorporate Flash technologies, you will be able to take advantage of a truly balanced solution."

According to Fowler, when the Sun Storage J400 product line is combined with Sun's servers, OpenSolaris and Solaris ZFS, customers can save ten times the cost over traditional arrays, and can reduce storage costs by up to 90 per cent. Customers can also mix and match components and re-use hardware by adding new software as their business needs change.

"Our high-performance search platform puts tremendous pressure on our data center. With the Sun Storage J4400 array, we can place 24 -- or even 48 -- drives in a single chassis," said Jason Bond Pratt, CIO at IT.com. "We can link them to a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server for massive parallel processing. We have two-to-four times fewer disk arrays to manage, and we can manage them with Solaris ZFS. And not once has I/0 been an issue."

"The Sun Storage J4500 array offers us high reliability, fast performance, and simple IT management. For example, now we don't have to reconfigure the underlying storage devices when we add disks to our Solaris ZFS-based storage pool, so the J4500 array's full capacity is immediately available," said Chuck Sears, Manager of Research Computing at the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.

The Sun Fire X4540 is the newest addition to the Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" systems, and according to Sun Microsystems is the first Open Storage server to integrate low-cost industry standard server and storage components under an open architecture.

The Sun Fire X4540 runs Solaris OS and Solaris ZFS, and has been certified on Sun MySQL database, Greenplum datawarehouse, CopperEyes secure data retrieval, and Zmanda ZRM for Sun MySql data backup. It can scale up to 48 drives in a single enclosure, and according to Sun Microsystems offers power and cooling savings of 30 to 50 per cent over traditional storage.

The X540, which starts at $22,000, addresses the largest growth segment in the storage industry: low cost, high capacity disk storage based on SATA technology. According to data provided by Sun Microsystems, the market for Open Storage is expected to surpass $10 billion by 2010, and the low-end storage market in particular is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of almost 23 per cent over the next three years.

The X540 is suitable for high-performance computing, storage grid, business intelligence, data warehousing and video streaming.