The Sun white paper "Sun Open Storage: A Lower-cost, Higher Performance Alternative for the Enterprise" argues that the high cost and inherent lack of flexibility of proprietary enterprise storage solutions lends compelling appeal to Sun's Open Storage offerings. Using industry-standard components and open-source software, open storage enables enterprises to build highly scalable, reliable, and flexible storage systems to fit their growing demands - all at a fraction of the cost of traditional, proprietary storage, the white paper maintains.

Enterprises that leverage Sun Open Storage can expect to enjoy:

• Lower costs. With open-source software and industry-standard systems, Sun Open Storage delivers enterprise reliability and scalability at one-tenth the cost of closed, proprietary storage systems.

• A high degree of flexibility. With Sun Open Storage, enterprises are not locked in to a single vendor; they can use the components that fit their needs and add new capabilities—from Sun or third parties—without paying a premium or annuity for proprietary products.

• High performance, simplified management. Sun Open Storage leverages sophisticated tools for optimizing performance and dramatically reducing the complexity of storage management.

• Innovation. With a large community of developers focused on creating new capabilities that meet enterprises’ storage needs, Sun Open Storage can quickly bring the best features to market

Open Storage meets the demands of Web 2.0 operations, the white paper contends, better than any other storage infrastructure or architecture available. The paper offers the example of Google and Amazon which it says could not exist in their current forms if they had built their own storage infrastructures based traditional, proprietary storage architectures rather than on open storage principles.

Similarly, the white paper continues, there are a number of technical advantages on the hardware side to building storage devices out of industry-standard system components and servers. One of the performance bottlenecks in a data center has been the network; by using open storage, applications can be brought closer to the data by running them on the same system dedicated to storage functions. Industry-standard servers also provide more processing capability and more cache memory than is available in a traditional modular storage array. And finally, an open-storage architecture allows enterprises to easily add CPUs, cache, and I/O connectivity, providing multi-dimensional scalability.

Among the Sun open storage offerings are OpenSolaris OS, Solaris ZFS technology, OpenSolaris Common Multiprotocol SCSI TARget (COMSTAR), Solaris DTrace, and Solaris 10 Fault Management Architecture, all of which enable an enterprise to manage the vast and increasing volume of data operations typically produce.

Further, the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System offers a turnkey storage solution specifically designed to leverage the powerful features of the OpenSolaris OS, bringing the promise and benefits of open storage to the enterprise.

The white paper also points out that the Sun Fire X4540 Storage Server is the first open-storage server that integrates industry-standard server hardware and storage components in an open architecture and leverages the open source-based Solaris ZFS software RAID, which maintains data redundancy without the expense of a hardware RAID controller or NVRAM. The Sun Fire X4540 server delivers the highest storage density and data throughput with a built-in, high-performance compute engine at half the cost and up to 50% power savings compared to traditional servers and storage arrays.

The paper concludes with the success story of Wikimedia Foundation which has implemented an open storage infrastructure and which, prior to that implementation experienced difficulty in expanding storage. "Now with ZFS, we can add disks and extend the ZFS pool, and we’re done—the space is instantly available. It doesn’t require us to replace everything if we need to expand, and we’re very happy about that,” says Brion Vibber, Wikimedia Foundation CTO.

More Information

OpenSolaris Community: Storage

Sun Open Storage

Sun Try and Buy

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems

Sun Fire X4540 Server [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter