To be a Major Software Update for Sun Storage 7000 Series Appliances
Is the 2010.02 release of the Sun Unified Storage System imminent, asks Joerg Moellenkamp after stumbling upon the wikis.sun.com page that offers release notes for the 2010.Q1.0.0 expected major software update for the Sun Storage 7000 series appliances. Although it was not yet downloadable for the public at the time of this writing, the software update promises to support the Sun Storage 7110, 7210, 7310, 7410, and 7000 Simulator.
Publishing Group Reaps Benefits from Sun’s Open Storage
Global publishing group Elanders provides “infomedia” content in print and online as well as archives documents and images on systems at its main office and two remote sites. With its technology reaching its end of life in 2008, Elander began researching the market and decided to deploy a 66TB Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System. The group reports it has cut administration time by 50%, power consumption by up to 50%, reduced customer costs by 40%, and its infrastructure is 10 times as scalable.
Takeover and failback are the two operations users most commonly associate with clusters. A recent Sun blog addresses how these operations in their latest iterations work on the Sun Storage 7310 and 7410 NAS appliances.
White Paper on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System
The Sun white paper “Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems: Architected for Open, Simple, and Scalable Enterprise Storage” details the key architectural aspects of Sun’s Open Storage family of products. The paper covers ZFS technology and its relation to Hybrid Storage Pools, Enterprise Solid State Storage Devices, and DTrace Analytics. It also highlights some of the main features of the Sun Storage 7110, 7210, 7310, and 7410 Unified Storage Systems. Readers will be introduced to the Sun Storage 7000 Storage Software, which is a full complement of storage software and is included with the system at no additional cost.
Sun is adding a 30 percent performance boost to Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System with the addition of new CPUs providing up to 24 cores. Enhancements include improved application performance through enhanced iSCSI SAN support and a boost in performance for Oracle databases. Higher network performance can be achieved with up to four times more bandwidth (40Gb/sec) and lower network latency through InfiniBand (IB), along with twice the DRAM cache - up to 512GB.
Throughput and IOPS Results for the 7410, 7310, 7210 and 7110 Storage Systems
The entire Sun Storage 7000 line are throughput workhorses, writes Roch Juin, with them delivering 10 Gbps level NAS services per cluster head nodes, using a single Network Interface and single IP address. In his blog, Juin shares recent performance tests of the array product line - Sun Storage 7410, 7310, 7210 and 7110. Performance results posted on his blog represent what is achieved under a very tightly defined constrained workload; however, he notes, it does not represent the performance limits of the systems themselves.
While the iSCSI-based Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System tested by NetworkWorld’s reviewer delivered as promised with respect to its high-performance claims, reviewer Logan Harbaugh expressed some reservations concerning usability and integration issues.
EasySpeedy, Danish Unmanaged Web Hosting Service Provider
Thanks to Sun’s Open Storage, do-it-yourself Web hosting services are being offered to the customers of EasySpeedy, headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. EasySpeedy chose to use Sun’s Open Storage platform to run its open server hosting because it is flexible and scalable enough to meet the needs of their customers, without the proprietary limitations.
No Hidden Costs, More Standard Features Set Solution Apart from Competitors
The Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System got high marks — five stars out of a possible six — from Dave Mitchell, whose review in ITPro praises Sun for making so many features standard on the 7410 and for not introducing hidden costs too late in the deal for customers to back out. The 7410, he writes, comes with unlimited snapshots, integral data compression, iSCSI thin provisioning, virus scanning and even remote replication.
