Sun Storage Customer Quotes

Thomson Reuters

"Upon the conclusion of our rigorous internal testing requirements, the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array reduced our total database operation times by an average of 4X and power saving by up to 4X. The F5100 proved to be the best storage solution to date which addresses our need to save power while still providing the necessary capacity for our I/O intensive applications. The performance has allowed us to meet ever-shrinking deadlines for completion of jobs, due to the F5100's fast I/O response times. In addition, it improves the performance in our existing servers, allowing us to increase the client count and maintain our performance SLAs without adding additional server or disk hardware. The end results were the deployment of faster applications, smaller space footprint, and lower energy utilization which ultimately helped our bottom line and our green initiatives."

--Paul Lavoie, Thomson Reuters

San Diego Supercomputer Center

"SDSC has been evaluating the F5100 Flash Storage unit as a high performance SamQFS metadata target. SamQFS is at the core of our archiving services and hosts well over one hundred million files. Performance improvement of 2.5 to 4 times was demonstrated for file creation and metadata scans, such as listing and backups. The F5100 is well suited for this purpose. Further testing will be done using the F5100 as a Lustre metadata target, as a high speed storage pool in Lustre 2.0 for user checkpoint data, an Oracle database storage device and an out-of-core storage device on an HPC cluster."

--Don Thorp, Production Systems, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Oregon State University

"The College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University had the opportunity to work with the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, and saw not only innovation in the product that Sun had engineered, but the potential to bridge a critical gap in the development of a solution that would help us deliver the next generation of research and education. COAS is investigating the delivery of real-time uncompressed streaming video - files that scale to over 3.5TB per hour - and in the trial the F5100 served exceptionally well as target for that video. 'We were excited by the potential that this product represents to the research community."

--Chuck Sears, Manager Research Computing, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University

IT Discovery

IT Discovery (www.it-discovery.com) leverages the social network and machine learning in the service of information retrieval. By deconstructing a large document collection into its constituent parts–dates, topics, correspondents, and text–and providing search results instantly instead of in minutes, IT Discovery provides real technology leverage for both linear and non-linear, strategic document review.

"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. 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. In short, the J4400 has been simply stunning."

--Jason Bond Pratt, CIO, IT.com

Oregon State University

Ocean observatories (sensors) and numerical models, in part because of their connection to the Internet, are enabling large continuous streams of complex, multi-dimensional data which requires a new approach to managing storage.

"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. This solution demonstrates Sun's Open Storage leadership, bringing together the best advantages of open-source software and industry-standard hardware."

--Chuck Sears, Manager Research Computing, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University

Pixelpark AG

Germany-based Pixelpark AG (www.pixelpark.com) started in 1991 as an agency focused on multimedia and Internet applications. Today, Pixelpark provides a full suite of web and enterprise application services, ranging from software development to testing and final qualification.

"With the Sun Storage J4000 arrays, our hard costs are very low—less than $1 per gigabyte for our bulk storage applications—despite the solution's solid performance. Its high-density drives also conserve valuable rack space. And it works with multiple systems, which means we can better mix and match components as our business needs change. This product clearly reflects Sun's commitment to innovation in Open Storage."

--Thorleif Wiik, IT Director, Pixelpark AG

Manukau Institute of Technology

Established in 1970, the Manukau Institute of Technology (http://www.manukau.ac.nz) is one of the premier education and training institutions in New Zealand, offering extensive programs and support for Pasifika students.

"The Sun Storage J4500 array makes the cost per terabyte for archiving and backup very lowÑI am really impressed with that. The J4500 array was also easy to integrate with our existing Sun SPARC servers and the ZFS file system in Solaris 10 OS. I am a huge advocate for ZFS and use it almost everywhere. I am also confident that with Sun's commitment to open source, everything in my environment will work well together."

--Scott Lawson, Systems Architect, Information Communication Technology Services, Manukau Institute of Technology

6.cn

6.cn is a successful China Web 2.0 and video sharing Web site committed to becoming the leading new media site serving mainland China and the global Chinese community.

"The Sun Fire X4500 combines server and storage technology, occupies a small space in the equipment room, and provides powerful performance and high throughput. It can be quickly deployed within a short time, satisfying our service requirements."

--Li Yifeng, R&D Director, 6.cn

Last.fm

Last.fm is a free global music Web site that offers music fans millions of tracks in every genre for free on-demand and radio streaming.

"The Sun Fire X4500 server's combination of 48 TB of disk storage in 4U of rack space and Solaris ZFS make a fantastic open- storage system."

--Mike Brodbelt, Director of Technical Operations and Infrastructure, Last.fm

Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit charitable organization that provides free, multilingual, online content through collaboratively edited Web sites called "wikis," among them its flagship project, Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is based in San Francisco, California, and has 23 full-time employees.

"We chose Sun Fire servers for their excellent price-performance ratio. The hybrid Sun Fire X4540 Storage Servers are very exciting because they offer a huge amount of storage and also deliver superior processor performance when we have a lot of read/write activity or a large number of uploads."

--Brion Vibber, Chief Technology Officer, Wikimedia Foundation

i365 (A Seagate Company)

"As a data protection, retention and discovery software and services provider, we believe the Sun 7000 series delivers a very attractive value proposition with very good high availability characteristics and presents a very simple, straightforward management model. It represents refreshing and original insights into reducing storage complexity and cuts through layers of fossilized storage technology thinking. In the end result we believe it attacks the most expensive and misunderstood element of storage: the operations costs. We look forward to rolling out the 7000 series in our production environment."

--David Allen, CTO of i365 (A Seagate Company)

DigiTar

DigiTar provides advanced messaging security and processing services over the Internet to customer organizations of all sizes. DigiTar's services include anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-phishing, firewall and remote access.

"OpenSolaris on an Open Storage platform like the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems is a powerful framework for us, because it liberates us to get the performance and flexibility we need not just the ones we can afford.

The Sun Storage 7000 software expands this freedom to everyone who doesn't have the time or inclination to build an array themselves. Windows, Linux, even OS X...with The Sun Storage 7000 series, everyone's invited to the Open Storage party."

--Jason Williams, COO/CTO, DigiTar

Media Temple, Inc.

During our evaluation of the OpenStorage 7410, we found that the combination of read and write biased flash storage and disk outperformed systems with 4-5X the number of spinning disks (and without any read write flash). We are still evaluating these units for use in a customer facing capacity, but we are definitely going to use these units in a data retention and data processing capacity. The expandability and the analytics capabilities offered by the OpenStorage 7410 units are very enticing to us, and may allow us to make some major changes to the architecture of our storage systems.

--Joshua Barratt, CTO, Media Temple

Motionbox, Inc.

Motionbox offers something unique - a safe, friendly, private online resource for individuals and families to store and share video in vivid HD quality. This naturally demands that we engineer a well tuned, highly responsive storage environment, and we have built just that around the Sun Storage 7410. My team was immediately abuzz when the 7000 series hit the market last fall. This solution was the best deal on high-capacity storage that we'd ever seen. Most important, however, the 7000 series is equally adept at serving both high-traffic videos and the 'long tail' of user-generated content Ð all on a single unit. Because our 7410 cluster comes configured with sizeable amounts of read & write cache, it can effortlessly serve content and support lots of transcoding operations across a wide spectrum of video usage patterns and the full path of a video's lifecycle. Sun unified storage gives us the flexibility to tune and configure multiple instances of the same device for throughput or capacity or whatever our needs may be. It was the ideal solution for us. Thanks, too, to the Sun Startup Essentials program, where I got the opportunity to discuss in-depth with Sun engineers to validate the best storage architecture to meet our intense demands.

--Chris Brown, VP Engineering, Motionbox, Inc.

OurStage, Inc.

Founded in 2006, in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, OurStage.com is the hottest place to be for independent musicians looking for fame and fortune. This Web site gives up-and-coming artists a chance to have their work seen and heard while site users pick monthly contest winners in various genres. The success of OurStage is due both to its popularity and its innovative ranking system.

"For a start-up, data integrity and fault recovery are special problems as the staff and budgets are small. The manageability and fault management of the S7000 meet this challenge in a small, dense package. The result for us has been a better solution with less investment in time and technical training."

--Mark Niedzielski, Infrastructure Manager, OurStage, Inc.

Notarius

"In 11 years of managing storage arrays, I've never had so much detailed information about exactly what is going on inside the storage system aside from how many IOPS. I've worked with almost all of the big names on some very high-end systems (EMC Symmetrix & Clariion, Hitachi 9900, NetApp & StorageTek) and DTrace Analytics is several orders of magnitude better than any other storage management software or debugging tool I've ever worked with. Good job!"

--David Robillard, UNIX team leader & Oracle DBA, Notarius

"I'm very interested in the fact that the Hybrid Storage Pools provide quite a lot of cache-speed (or near cache-speed) access to our Oracle data. The Analytics, the fact that the systems are built from well-known hardware components and the HSP were very important in our decision to go forward with the purchase of those machines."

--David Robillard, UNIX team leader & Oracle DBA, Notarius

Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise

"The software that is the heart of the Sun Storage 7000 surprised us with its power and simplicity. Installation and configuration were a breeze, but the speed with which we could diagnose and resolve storage issues is what really surprised us - it was like nothing we had seen before. This is an exciting addition to the Open Storage offerings we are seeing coming out of Sun."

--Luke Stackle, Director of IT, Diocese of Boise

TV5 Canada

We acquired a Sun Storage 7410 as a near line storage solution for video content (content we would use in the next 3-90 days). After testing and optimizing the Sun unified storage solution, we were surprised and impressed to discover that Sun's open solution was interoperable with our existing broadcast infrastructure, and came to find that throughput was superior to what we had seen with our XSAN - even in terms of editing HD video! By prioritizing video applications, we were also able to use the solution with virtualization in our IT operation (something we found impossible to do with XSAN). We had considered a competitive NAS solution, but the cost was 25% greater, and didn't give us the necessary throughput.

Ultimately, with the exceptional value, capacity, tuning of applications so that it could support two different roles, and Sun's analytics considered, we've retired the XSAN and consolidated all data for both our IT and broadcast infrastructures on Sun unified storage.

--Regis Harrison, Director of Production and Technologies, TV5 Canada

Cornèr Banca SA

Cornèr Banca SA - a private, independent Swiss bank established in 1952 - counts on Sun to provide a flexible storage virtualization infrastructure for secure operation of its business-critical applications on mainframe and open systems platforms. The Bank introduced the Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager in its IT environment for backup and restore of its mainframe tape architecture.

"Thanks to Sun's Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) technology, our systems were not only released of important management and disaster recovery functions but we also witnessed a substantial optimization of our resources, resulting in fewer tape resources and drastically cutting down on our footprint. Now able to handle 30 percent year-over-year data growth without increasing the number of system engineers and storage administrators, Cornèr Banca is committed to virtualization and to Sun."

-- Charles Inches, First Vice President, Cornèr Banca SA

For more information, please see the Sun Cornèr Banca SA success story.

Gruppo Novellini

"Gruppo Novellini, Italian manufacturer of shower enclosures, bathtubs and whirlpool tubs, selected Sun Microsystems' servers and storage to host and back up its SAP R/3 applications in an SAP NetWeaver environment. "Based on recommendations given by IT-Link, an SAP VAR partner and our main ICT partner, we chose Sun's SPARC Enterprise M4000 and Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers along with the Sun Blade 6000 system and Sun StorageTek 6140 array to help us simplify our IT operations. Faster time to market, reduced delivery times and lower costs are critical to stay competitive, and Sun technology delivers the scalability we need to address our current and future business requirements - while optimizing price/performance."

--Gianfranco Novellini, President of Gruppo Novellini

Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited

"We needed competitive and modern technology that would not only support our mainframe and open systems environment, but also consolidate our infrastructure and better position HKEx for future business growth and expansion. By upgrading to a more powerful new Sun system, with Sun StorageTek disk, tape and virtual storage technology, we were able to achieve this, and at the same time reduce footprint and power consumption. Sun services helped ensure a smooth transition and upgrade to this new technology so that our IT system could provide a robust and flexible platform for the Exchange business."

--Alfred Wong, Chief Technology Officer, Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited