New storage from Sun: J4200/4400/4500 and X4540 Storage Server

Sun announced some new storage components today: At first we announced the J4200 and J4400 disk arrays. They are JBOD´s, just bunches of disks. The J4200 has up to 12 SAS or SATA disks in a 2 RU enclosure.

The new J4400 is a 4 RU enclosure with 24 SAS or SATA disks. It´s a doubled up version of the J4200:

Well … and then there is the J4500. As the name suggests, it´s a JBOD that looks really similar to the X4500 - the Thumper - and it has similar characteristics: 48 harddisks on 4 rack units. <table width=90%>

</tr> </table> When you look at the rear side of the J4500 you will not see the Opteron based System controller. Instead of this you see an interface board with four SAS-connectors. Two of them are host connect ports. The other two are used to stack J4500 enclosures together. And last but not least there is the X4540. It´s our new storage server. It looks almost as the old one. The changes are internal ones. The system now uses quad-core chips instead of dual-cores, the system gives you 3 PCI Express slots instead of the PCI-X slots of the old system. The new X4540 has a slot for a compact-flash card to boot the operating system. Or to say it more shortly: We integrated the stuff our customers wanted to see in the next-gen thumper.