Partner Feature

March 2008 - Art Tolsma is CEO of Sun reseller and ISV Luminex, and had been for some time when Sun announced the acquisition of StorageTek in June 2005. He decided then to take a closer look at Sun storage products, especially a diminutive, powerful server/storage platform then under development called "Thumper." When it was later unveiled as the Sun Fire X4500 last April, Luminex announced the availability of the Sun Fire X4500 Data Server for Mainframes,and Tolsma thought he was onto a good thing. And he was because just nine months later Luminex now boasts a growing number of customer installations and references for this unique Sun server-based solution that appears to the mainframe as a virtual tape library that operates at ultra-high speed.

Tolsma says Luminex has now certified the Data Server for Mainframes solution to run on all Solaris 10 platforms. "That allows storing and accessing mainframe tape data at disk-based speed--with built-in ZFS data integrity and robust Solaris 10 reliability," says Tolsma.

Business Benefits

Mainframe computers continue to store and manage most of the business-critical data in the world economy, and accessing, processing, and protecting that data is central to enterprise IT operations. Luminex, according to Tolsma, relies on the enterprise-class reliability, features, and industry-leading technology of Sun servers, software, and storage to provide these mainframe-using customers more options to optimize their data center environments.

A key, bottom-line business benefit of this solution is lower total cost of ownership--by leveraging high-volume mainstream storage capabilities, with greater performance capabilities than many traditional mainframe competitor's solutions. In addition to TCO, a particular area of current customer interest is the ability to employ disk-based technologies and existing WAN infrastructures to replicate data from a primary data center to a remote site for disaster recovery purposes.

What Sparked This Idea?

Tolsma says part of his job is to keep strict tabs on all developments in the storage market. "As the Sun Fire X4500 (still widely known as Thumper) started getting more corporate recognition within Sun--that was probably through Spring and Summer of 2006--we put in an internal effort at Luminex to try and certify and develop a product based on that…And we were able to test and prove that the ZFS file system and all the new, cool stuff that Sun was promoting would work well with our products."

According to Tolsma, "Thumper remains of great interest, because it offers customers a simple, clean, all-in-one mainframe storage solution that provides enterprise features at entry-level price. And the new ZFS is an innovative, high-performance file system from Sun that offers data center-grade features, such as dual-parity RAID, and compression, that work best with internal or direct-attached storage. So the X4500 Server turns out to be a perfect storage device by providing a large capacity of high-speed, low-cost disk drives internal to the server that can run Solaris/ZFS,” says Tolsma.

At Sun Forum in October 2006, Luminex began to promote the Data Server for Mainframes by distributing fliers and "we caught the eye of some key Sun folks," says Tolsma. "From there, there were follow-on conversations, onsite meetings and corporate sponsorships." And a partnership around the solution was born.

Sun Partnership Advantage

"Working with Sun," says Tolsma, "is a great experience"--which includes joint sales calls and installation support. "Sun is a much bigger organization than we are with deep customer relationships, which is a great and real advantage to us. Sometimes we have to hustle to keep pace with the growing number of opportunities." Luminex, founded in 1994, has been a Sun partner since its inception; its first IT purchase, Tolsma remarks, was in fact a Sun server.

What's on the Horizon?

What's next for Luminex and this unique, open-systems mainframe solution? Lately, says Tolsma, Luminex has been focusing on driving standards-based, high-volume solutions into "high-value" mainframe environments. This strategy encompasses high availability and clustering scenarios at a significantly lower cost than mainframe customers have come to expect. Speaking of the Sun partnership and the Data Server for Mainframes combination, Tolsma says he is excited: "Really there's nothing in the industry today that comes close to matching it."