|
The need for scalable, cost-effective storage is on the rise at campus datacenters. Digital preservation and creation of “cybraries” are forcing storage administrators at educational institutions to find new ways to store and manage terabytes and even petabytes of data.
As demand rises and data volumes mount, it’s clear that traditional, proprietary storage models are not sustainable. Campus storage administrators are looking to break out of vendor lock-in and transition to systems that deliver the open flexibility and scalability needed to affordably handle massive volumes of information — research content, audio-visual materials, cultural artifacts, and more.
Sun’s Open Storage initiative is geared to enable storage administrators in education to freely mix and match components and reuse hardware by adding new software as business needs change. (For more on the Open Storage concept, see this June 2008 EduConnection article).
“Open Storage is going to completely revolutionize the storage landscape,” said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun’s Systems Group. “It represents an important transition from proprietary, closed storage technology to open-source software, industry-standard hardware, and innovative solutions.”
 |
Video: Open Storage
Hear John Fowler talk about how Sun's new products fit into the Open Storage market.
|
Now Sun is building out its Open Storage initiative with a new line of economical storage arrays and an addition to the popular Sun Fire X4500 “Thumper” family of storage/server hybrids. Along with the fast-growing Open Storage community, these new systems give educational IT innovative solutions to tackle such challenges as digital asset management, data curation, federated archiving, and more.
Storage Starting at Less than $1 per GB
The new Sun Storage J4000 product line offers customers a low $3,000 starting price and breakthrough pricing — below $1 per GB — for bulk storage applications. Because it allows up to 12 drives per rack unit, the Sun Storage J4000 family saves precious rack space. When used with OpenSolaris and industry-leading servers from Sun, the Sun Storage J4000 family can reduce storage costs up to 90 percent.
The Sun Storage J4000 family is also the industry's most scalable, with up to two times the storage density, three times the connectivity, two times the availability, and up to 10 times more available capacity than traditional low-end storage products. The J4000 family includes three new systems, along with new connectivity technology:
Universities Save Money with Open Storage
Longtime Sun customer Oregon State University looks to Sun to support oceanic observatories that require large continuous streams of complex, multidimensional data and a new approach to managing storage. The university was one of the first Sun customers to see the flexibility and breakthrough economics of Sun's new Sun Storage J4000 family. “The Sun StorageTek J4500 array offers us high reliability, fast performance, and simple IT management," said Chuck Sears, manager of research computing, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University.
"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,” Sears said. “This solution demonstrates Sun’s Open Storage leadership, bringing together the best advantages of open-source software and industry-standard hardware."
“With the Sun Storage J4000 arrays, our hard costs are very low — less than $1 per GB for our bulk storage applications — despite the solution's solid performance.”
— Thorleif Wiik
IT Director, Pixelpark AG
Sun Storage J4000 arrays are also in use at Germany-based Pixelpark AG, which focuses on multimedia and Internet applications.
"With the Sun Storage J4000 arrays, our hard costs are very low — less than $1 per GB for our bulk storage applications — despite the solution's solid performance,” said Thorleif Wiik, Pixelpark IT director. “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."
Another Sun Storage J4000 customer is the Manukau Institute of Technology in New Zealand, an education and training institution offering programs for Pasifika students.
"The Sun Storage J4500 array makes the cost per terabyte for archiving and backup very low — I am really impressed with that,” said Scott Lawson, systems architect, Information Communication Technology Services, Manukau Institute of Technology.
“The J4500 array was also easy to integrate with our existing Sun SPARC servers and the ZFS file system in Solaris 10 OS,” Lawson added. “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."
Extreme Storage Density in the Sun Fire X4540 Server
With up to 48 drives in a single enclosure, the new Sun Fire X4540 storage server offers the industry's highest storage density and savings of up 30 to 50 percent in power and cooling compared to competing solutions, at one-half the price of traditional storage.
The Sun Fire X4540 builds on the Sun Fire X4500, winner of the InfoWorld 2008 Technology of the Year Award for “Best Storage Server.” Compared to the Sun Fire X4500, this next-generation system:
- Uses the new AMD Barcelona quad-core processor
- Doubles the computing capacity for the same disk subsystem
- Doubles the number of processing cores
- Quadruples memory size to up to 64 GB
The Sun Fire X4540 server uses PCI Express I/O technology for more than triple the system I/O-to-network bandwidth. It has a compact flash disk slot for booting the operating system (saving disk space) and runs the Solaris ZFS file system, Linux, and Windows. It also addresses the largest growth segment in the storage industry — low-cost yet high-capacity disk storage based on SATA technology.
For educational institutions, the Sun Fire X4540 is ideal for high-performance computing (HPC), storage grid, video streaming, and other applications. The new Sun Fire X4540 storage server has also been certified for the MySQL database, Greenplum data warehouse, CopperEye secure data retrieval, and Zmanda ZRM for MySQL data backup.
“Our portfolio of Open Storage platforms has expanded with the addition of Sun's new Sun Storage J4000 family and an addition to our high-performance, high-value Sun Fire X4500 Thumper systems,” said Sun’s John Fowler. “These new building blocks deliver impressive density and capacity while empowering customers to take advantage of the efficiencies of general purpose storage powered by open source software."
|
