Get fully-integrated Flash-based storage with Flash-optimized software in the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array that strives to accelerate Oracle and MySQL database workloads and optimize storage architectures. It features up to two terabytes of solid-state Flash capacity, 1.6 million read and 1.2 million write IOPS performance. Available in a single rack unit (1.75 inches), the new array consumes 300 watts of energy. The 1.6 million IOPS of performance is comparable to 3,000 enterprise hard disk drives that could span over 14 data center racks and consume more than ten times the energy (40,000 watts), Sun relays.

Each Sun F5100 array is one rack-unit in height and can be zoned and connected to up to 16 separate hosts so that a single F5100 can be used by more than one application environment. Included unified management and monitoring software provides a single storage management window across a wide range of operating systems.

Owen Hall points out that the new flash array comes with Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager software, which provides a common, simple-to-use interface for Sun Storage arrays. "The software takes the complexity out of storage management, enabling you to accelerate deployment, simplify your environment, and improve utilization," he explains. Additionally, the Common Array Manager Service Advisor offers proactive health checking and supports quick time to service. System error messages are connected directly to specific repair procedures in Sun's knowledge base, making common repairs simple and easy.

Sun reports it has recorded world-record performance from one Sun F5100 array with 12.8 gigabyte-per-second of I/O bandwidth. The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array enabled the Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 server to produce a world record result on the Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll 9.0 N.A. application benchmark. This benchmark represents typical online transaction processing workloads for processing employee payroll. According to Sun, the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array improved I/O performance for this application with ten times better latency versus traditional fibre channel disks while, at the same time, working with Oracle Database 11g to process up to 250,000 employee payroll checks.

Best performance was also achieved on a suite of Mechanical Computer-Aided Engineering (MCAE) application tests that included MSC/NASTRAN, Abaqus/Standard and ANSYS 12.0. In this testing, the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array worked with the Sun Fire X4270 server. Sun Flash storage and server technologies delivered a world record result on Abaqus/Standard and demonstrated between 65% and up to 2x improvement on various subsets of ANSYS 12.0 BMD and MSC/NASTRAN compared to the internal SAS disks configured with RAID0. These applications are based on the finite element method of analysis (FEA) and represent the more I/O intensive group of MCAE workloads.

"San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has been evaluating the F5100 Flash Storage array as a high performance SamQFS metadata target, which sits at the core of our archiving services and hosts well over one hundred million files," said Don Thorp, Production Systems, San Diego Supercomputer Center. "Performance improvement of 2.5 to four times was demonstrated for file creation and metadata scans, such as listing and backups. Further testing will be done using the Sun Storage F5100 as a Lustre metadata target, high speed storage pool in Lustre 2.0 for user checkpoint data, Oracle database storage device and out-of-core storage device on an HPC cluster."

Pricing begins at $45,995 (US).

More Information

Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array

Video Introduction with Sun Systems Group EVP John Fowler, Sun Storage CTO and Distinguished Engineer Jeff Bonwick, and Sun Systems Group Design Engineer Ganesh Ramamurthy (runs 9:47)

1.6 Million 4K IOPS in 1RU on Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array - BestPerf blog

Why Sun Storage F5100 is a good option for Peoplesoft NA Payroll Application - BestPerf blog

MCAE MCS/NASTRAN faster on Sun F5100 and Fire X4270 - BestPerf blog

MCAE ANSYS faster on Sun F5100 and Sun X4270 - BestPerf blog

SSDs Are So Yesterday - Marc Hamilton's blog entry

Sun Flash Storage [...read more...]

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