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The Sun Storage 7000 family got a new member. There were many customers, where a 7410 was a little bit large, but needed the cluster functionality (a feature missing at the 7110 and 7210 mandated by their design, you can't failover when the storage is in the head). So there was quite a demand for a smaller 7410. The Sun Storage 7310 was made with this demand in mind. Will help to stop some discussions at the customers.

The most important feature: You can put the 7310 heads into a HA cluster. They are smaller than the 7410 heads, so you "just" put 2 Opterons in them, not 4 The head is based on a 2-socket, 1RU server with 8 drive bays (2 used for boot disks). Thus you can add 6 SSD for read-acceleration via L2ARC per node (600 GB per node, 1.2 TB per cluster). 64 GB memory (it's used mostly as a DRAM cache for the filesystem). You can attach up to 96 TB of disk storage. Featurewise the system is equivalent to the others system, as it use the same software. System prices starts at $40,140 list price, all software features included.

You will find additional informations at the Sun Website: sun.com: Sun Storage 7310 Unified Storage System

Some new systems were announced a few days ago. All are Nehalem based. And all of them have some special features seperating them from the competition. But this isn´t the point of this article.

I find one system the most interesting: Really long ago i´ve speculated about the usage of internal storage for other systems to provide a SAN without conventional storage , at this time we´ve just talked about iSCSI and about system with 2.5" disks. Now look at the X4275. The system with 12 3,5" disks on 2 rack units.

A while ago, i speculated about a combination of SamFS and a cloud storage service in SamFS at home. Yesterday i´ve read Angelos article about mouting Amazon S3 Buckets in OpenSolaris. You have to take into consideration, that SamFS on-disk archiving isn´t much more than using directories in a filesystem to store the data in container files.

The integration of S3 buckets is done by using the s3fs as a userland filesystem with FUSE (there is an FUSE implementation available on opensolaris.org as it´s foundation. Thus you can access the S3 service as a normal filesystem. The combination of both components (SamFS and s3fs) should give you the capability to archive your data into an S3 bucket while having the data in regular use in your SamFS cache.

PS: I hope i find some time to try this next weekend.

News from the SLC flash front - Micron, Sun take NAND endurance to one million cycles:

Micron Technology Inc. (Boise, Idaho) has said it has worked with Sun Microsystems Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) to develop a single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology that extends the lifespan of flash-based storage for enterprise applications and reaches a million write cycles.

The IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker report for the third quarter of 2008 showed an positive development for Sun. The Register reports:

Although Sun is listed by IDC in the 'Others' category, it grew disk storage system sales 25 per cent in its second consecutive quarter of revenue growth, with 16.1 per cent growth in external disk systems. The company sold more disk storage for Unix servers than any other supplier has done, it claimed, for the past 20 consecutive quarters. If the new Open Storage products take off then it could start approaching Hitachi and NetApp. That would be a noteworthy feat.

Adam Leventhal wrote an really insightful piece about the potential effect of the Hybrid Storage Pool to the storage business in "Casting the shadow of the Hybrid Storage Pool":

What we have today though integrates flash in a way that changes the landscape of storage economics and delivers cost efficiencies that haven't been seen before. If the drives manufacturers don't already, it can't be long until they hear the death knell for 15K RPM drives loud and clear

When the performance of a storage architecture is ensured by SSD there isn´t really a need for low capacity 15k discs ... 7200 rpm (or even lower) drives with high capacity are more than enough.

Roger Bitar did some really interesting benchmarks with mysql on SSD. In his benchmarks he artificially constrained the availability of memory for the mysql buffers (aka cache):

We choose to test MySQL, the open source database (DB), using a simple MySQL benchmark called Sysbench. We populated the Sysbench table with 112 Million rows (around 26GB size) that fit on 1 SSD drive . We executed read-only queries while varying the buffer size. We mounted the file system in DIRECTIO mode to disable file system caching. We perfrormed the tests with regular HDDs and repeated them with SSDs.

There results were somewhat astounding. Of course a fully memory saturated database is the fastest way to implement a database (buffer cache at 24 GB). But with a database on SSD Roger was able to yield 96 percent of the performance of the in-memory database even with heavily constrained RAM space (buffer cache limited to 8 GB). The latency at memory constrained situation is vastly better with SSD than with rotating rust.

This leads me to an interesting conclusion: When you just compare the power consumption of SSD and hard disks (aka rotating rust), you forget a part of the equation. Let´s assume a FB DIMM takes 10 watts (it´s a little bit more, but 10 is easier for calculating). In the benchmark you were able to have almost the same performance with SSD (2 watts) at 8 GB as at 24 GB. Let´s assume 4 GB DIMMS. You would save 18 Watts (10*2-2) by using the SSD. Okay 18 watts isn´t a big deal, but now think about a 240 GB database.

You can design your database server in quite a different manner, when you take SSD into your considerations.

Sun announced a number of new blades for the Blade 6000 chassis yesterday. From my perspective two of them were especially interesting. The first one is the Sun Blade 6000 disk module. It´s an 8-slot disk module based on SAS (you will find in-depth informations in the Sun Blade™ 6000 Disk Module Configuration Guide manual).

The other important was the Sun Blade T6340 server module. This blade is equiped with two UltraSPARC T2+ procs. Thus you have 128 threads in one blade in a system and up to 256 GB of memory. When you look at the blade, you will recognize that a large part of the circuit board is occupied by memory slots. At the moment this is the blade with the biggest memory capacity in the industry.

In addition to this both blades we´ve announced a dual-proc Opteron based blade with the X6240 for the Blade Server 6000 chassis. The Blade Sun Netra CP3250 ATCA. This isn´t a standard blade for the 6000 or 8000 blade chassis. It´s a Xeon server blade for usage in telco blade servers.

Ben Rockwood gave a really interesting keynote at the first Open Storage Summit about "Storage in the Cloud". When you are interested in storage with Opensolaris it´s definitly worth a look.

I´m not entirely sure if it´s a good idea to talk about the winds of change amidst the hurricane season, but Jonathan wrote a good article about the changing perspectives in our storage business - Fanning the Winds of Change in Storage:

But back to the equity analyst - he patiently asked, "Great theory, but when will you see revenue results?"

"Last year," I responded. "You're seeing it accelerate."

Ashlee Vance blogs at his new employer about our FISHworks concept. I really think, there is a common misunderstanding about FISHworks. Most people still doesn´t get the idea behind FISHworks. Ashlee writes, that we are too secret about the stuff and that we didn´t show off something.

At first - Fishwork isn´t a filer. Period. It´s an important part of the filer project. Fishwork is more like a way to build appliances, it´s a way to make appliances out of Solaris.

Apropos storage, Computerworld did a nice piece about upcoming Opensolaris based storage appliances.

The Register reports about the actual IDC number in the storage market:

But while the market grew 18.8 per cent compared to Q2 cy'07 only Sun (34.7 per cent) and NetApp (22.9 per cent) outgrew the market and gained share. The other six vendors all gave up share growing as follows

And we didn´t even announced the OpenStorage based products ... as far as i see it from my perspective and the internally available informations, they will give us a huge opportunity to grow. Interesting times adhead of us.

Elektronkind wrote a nice summary about all the features interesting for a storage admin in OpenSolaris 2008.11 - A Preview For The Storage Admin. He highlights the most important features of the Solaris Operating Environment in regard of storage.

Today we have announced the 1 TB tape drive: Sun Microsystems Announces World's First One Terabyte Tape Storage Drive. The the T10000B delivers 120 MB/sec throughput with 1 TB native. The next competitor (LTO4) has 800 GB native.The only disadvantage: This tape drives are enterprise hardware and build to last ... so the pricetag is $37.000. So don´t wait for it as you backup solution at home.