Sun Microsystems says in the six months since the launch of its next-generation Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems package it has sold more than 800 deployments, constituting more than 17 petabytes of capacity over a cross-section of vertical markets.Sun Microsystems had some welcome good news to report May 7. After six
months in general release, the company's first home-designed and developed
storage appliances, the "Amber Road"
Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems, have been selling like gangbustersdespite
the recession.
Since the launch
of Amber Road Nov. 10, 2008, Sun has sold more than 800 of the hybrid SSD/HDD
(solid state drive/hard disk drive) deployments consisting of more than 17
petabytes of capacity over a cross-section of markets large and small, Sun
Group Manager of Storage Products Ray Austin told eWEEK.
"This is the fastest ramp-up in sales of any storage product in the
history of the company," Austin
said. "That includes [all products from the] StorageTek [division]. In the
short time it's been out in the marketplace, it's grown faster than any other
product."
StorageTek was an independent storage tape and hard disk designer and manufacturer
that Sun acquired for $4.1 billion in 2005. StorageTek's hardware and software,
and the maintenance of a large installed base, have since made up the bulk
of Sun's storage business.
Amber Road is the first
storage product Sun has released that uses a combination of OpenSolaris
software, NAND flash drives and hard disk drives.
Click here for images of the Sun Storage 7000 line.
"It's breaking ice in a number of areas. The list of vertical markets
we've sold into is very diverse: manufacturing, financial services, government,
education, media [and] entertainmentit's pretty broad," Austin
said.
Finding a home in mixed data centers
Amber Road is being used
by mixed Linux-Windows shops in a number of waysmost often for simple file sharing,
because it has the ability to export a file across multiple protocols in a
single instance, Austin said.
Amber Road also works
well with VMware, because it allows a user to drill down to a virtual machine
level and track location and performance of any and all VMs in a system, he
said.
"One of the big pain points for virtualized shops is that admins don't
always know where the hot spots [problems with disks] are coming
from," Austin said.
"Using the 7000, they can reassign their shared storage on VMs to a
different server easily. With the DTrace analytics in Amber
Road, the user can really hone in on bottlenecks
in the virtual storage infrastructure."
The Sun Storage 7000 line consists of three products: the 7110 (2TB maximum
capacity), the 7210 (up to 60TB) and the 7410 (up to 288TB).
All of them use Sun's open-source ZFS (Zettabyte File System) and the DTrace
system analysis tool and can be up and running in about 5 minutes, Sun claims.
Pricing starts at about $11,000 for the 2TB version.
Seeing action in enterprise shops
One of the main drivers is that Sun Storage 7000 line can be used by small
and midsize companies in its small form, or in a large corporate data
center, Austin said.
The biggest advantage that Amber Road
brings users, Sun Vice President for Systems John Fowler told eWEEK, is that
the appliance offers "vastly easier storage administration and maintenance
than other storage products. For example, it takes less than 5 minutes for
installation and provisioning."
Because it uses the next-generation ZFS, Fowler said, the Amber
Road storage devices have eliminated the use of
RAID arrays, RAID controllers and volume management software.
"All the [traditional] day-to-day management involving moving storage
online and managing storage resources is dramatically reduced in time and
effort," Fowler said.