Sun Storage F5100 officially announced

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Sun Storage F5100 officially announced

Monday, October 12. 2009

Sun has now announced the F5100 officially. The specs are really impressive: The largest version with 80 FMods yields 1.6 Million read IOPS and 1.2 million write IOPS with 4k blocks. 12.8 GB/sec read and 9.7 GB/sec write. 1,920 GB capacity. It uses 386 watts while active. More specs are available at the Sun specs page for the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. Furthermore the documentation of this devices should reappear soon at docs.sun.com. Until that moment you will find some additional information about the device at Sun's website. This device isn't that expensive as you may think. The device starts at $45,995 (with 20 Flash Modules giving you 480 GB, 397 K IOPS read and 304 K IOPS write).

When you look in such a device you will see 80 densly packed FMods.

In the back of the device you will find the SAS connectors for the device. There are four domains with 4 SAS connectors each. For a maximum performance configuration you configure 5 FMods and a SAS connector into a zone.

Most important: The FMods doesn't have a battery on each module to protect the caches. This is done centrally by super capacitors in so called Energy Storage Modules. You plug them into the front of these devices.

Just a warning: Those ESM are quite potent super caps. Read the manual with care before handling those modules. You need a lot of power to protect all the caches and those ESM are capable to deliver this power.

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Solaris, Sun/Oracle, Technology at 08:48 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)
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9.7 GB/sec IOPS => 9.7 GB/sec write?

Looks pretty, but the wiring limitations in the manuals was a bit perplexing; couldn't connect a domain to more than one host at a time. so why put 4 ports per domain?

#1 vizzini on 2009-10-12 11:30 (Reply)

You can zone a domain into four groups and put a SAS port in each of this zones. You need those ports to get the most out of a domain because a single SAS 4x isn't capable to drive it.

#1.1 Jörg+M. (Homepage) on 2009-10-12 11:39 (Reply)

Thanks for the hint. I've corrected the typo with the GBps IOPS ...

#1.2 Jörg+M. (Homepage) on 2009-10-12 11:41 (Reply)

There are a lot of single point of failure. For FMod replacement you have to stop storage.
Also you can`t monitor FMods errors.

It will be a good device for HPC if it will have Infiniband ports, but for database storage its very poor architecture.

And I also think, that throughput of servers HBAs is smaller than this enclosure.
May be Alpha server can provide this throughput.

#2 Jon (Homepage) on 2009-10-13 09:33 (Reply)

1. You can connect up to 16 HBA to this device.
2. For databases you would use 2 of this devices in a mirrored configuration. It's not meant as a single storage device.
3. When used as L2ARC or SZIL you would have multiple points of getting slower, not of failure (of course sometimes it's the same), as ZFS would switch over to using normal ZIL or don't use L2ARC.
4. Health-checking FMods and ESM is done via the Sun Common Array Manager

#2.1 Jörg+M. (Homepage) on 2009-10-13 10:07 (Reply)

1. You can connect up to 16 HBA to this device.
You have limited number of IO slots per server, and you also need connect minimum 4 ports if you use full loaded F5100. If you use dual path you need 8 connections to DB server.

4. Health-checking FMods and ESM is done via the Sun Common Array Manager
I`m pretty shore, that this can`t monitor life time of FMod, cause FMod will have only performance decrement.

#2.1.1 Jon (Homepage) on 2009-10-13 11:07 (Reply)

In max performance configuration, this system isn't meant to be used by a single server or when used by a single server to be used by a large one that has the capability to drive 1.6M IOPS like the M9000 class.

For configurations where you need more than the available slots, you could use the External I/O Unit (http://www.sun.com/servers/midrange/external_io/features.xml) which is supported by all T5xxx and M4000 to M9000.

As described by the manual multipathing is not supported (http://docs.sun.com/source/835-0772-01/cggfgcfb.html). For data availability with a single box you would mirror domains.

#2.1.1.1 Jörg+M. (Homepage) on 2009-10-13 11:50 (Reply)

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