Details on Sun Storage 6180 Array

The power to achieve better performance with fewer drives - lowering acquisition, support and operational costs - is what Sun proposes the Sun Storage 6180 Array offers customers. It also scales and integrates seamlessly all the way up to the flagship Sun Storage 6780 Array. Offering redundant components, the Sun Storage 6180 Array provides automated I/O path failover, and extensive online configuration, reconfiguration and maintenance capabilities.

The 6180 ensures stored data is protected with DACstore technology stores configuration metadata on each drive, RAID 6 technology guards against concurrent drive failures and errors, and persistent cache backup to ensure any data in cache is captured and safe in the event of a power outage.

Some of the 6180's key features and benefits include:

8Gb/s FC Interfaces

These reduce the number of HBAs per server and the number of overall ports in their FC SAN infrastructure without sacrificing performance.

Auto-negotiating 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel interfaces allows the 6180 to seamlessly integrate into an existing 2 Gb/s or 4 Gb/s infrastructure, while providing investment protection going forward when SAN becomes 8 Gb/s.

The 8 Gb/s FC interfaces provide the bandwidth needed to satisfy the large aggregate workloads created by consolidation

Up to 112 Intermixed Drives

FC disks are allocated to applications that demand high performance and have high I/O rates and less-expensive SATA disks are allocated to applications that require less performance.

Support for Multiple RAID Levels; including RAID 6

The 6180 is designed to support high availability and security for mission-critical data as well as offer flexibility to configure the system to address varying service levels.

Balanced Performance

Support applications with wide-ranging performance requirements, including concurrently supporting transactional-applications, such as databases and OLTP, and throughput-intensive applications, such as HPC and rich media.

Built-in Efficiencies

The 6180 array's modular design provides an affordable entry-point while offering seamless "pay-as-you-grow" scalability as requirements change.

A lower raw capacity requirement and support for intermixing high performance and high capacity drives enables tiered storage.

Its per drive performance creates performance value by getting the most performance out of the fewest drives.

Sun Storage Common Array Manager (CAM)

The storage management software enables utilization and uninterrupted data availability. Configuration flexibility supports custom LUN tuning to ensure performance or utilization.

The Sun Storage CAM offers centralized management of all local and networked CAM-based systems, and allows system administrators to quickly configure and monitor storage from a centralized interface. Users can configure volumes, perform routine maintenance and add new enclosures and capacity without interrupting access to data.

Dynamic Expansion Capabilities

This feature provides additional capacity and elimination of application interruptions. The 6180 is designed to bring unused storage online for a new host group or an existing volume to provide additional capacity on demand.

With these capabilities in place, the array is also designed to eliminate application interruptions due to growth, reconfigurations or tuning.

Redundant, Hot-swappable Components

Designed to maintain data availability by allowing components to be replaced without stopping I/O.

Other Specifics

3 RU chassis
Backwards compatibility: auto-negotiates 8, 4, and 2 Gb/s SANs
Five to 16 hard disk drives per CSM200 expansion tray
Battery-backed and mirrored data cache with persistent cache backup in the event of a power outage
Four Ethernet ports
Optional storage domains (up to 128)
Support RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10
Robust data protection (Optional Data Snapshot, Data Volume Copy and Data Remote Replication)
NEBS Level 3 Certified

SUPPORTED OPERATING SYSTEMS

The Sun Storage 6180 array supports the following Operating Systems:

Solaris 9 and 10
Microsoft Windows 2008 Standard Server, Enterprise Server, Web and Core Editions SP2, Hyper -V
Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Standard, Enterprise Editions
HP-UX 11.23, 11.31
IBM AIX 5.3, 6.1
Red Hat Linux Enterprise edition v. 4U7, v. 5U3
SUSE Linux v10 SP2, SLES 11
VMware ESX 3.5U4, 4.0

UPGRADE PLAN

With "CLIPP", the Customer Loyalty and Investment Protection Program for the Sun Storage Midrange Modular Disk Family, there are three ways to upgrade with the CLIPP program:

1) IBB/UAP Trade-in Program: Customers can trade-in qualified Sun storage systems or qualified non-Sun storage systems for trade-in allowances towards the purchase of a new Sun Storage 6180 Array or CMS200 expansion trays. Trade-in allowances range from 5-20%, depending on the value of the returned equipment and the Sun Storage 6180 configuration or CMS200 expansion tray being purchased.

2) Redeployment of Legacy Trays: The Data-In-Place Migration (DIPM) process allows customers to re-deploy legacy trays behind newer controllers without the need to migrate data over the network. By retaining the majority of the hardware, costly migration expenses are eliminated reducing storage TCO. The only legacy expansion tray supported for the Storage 6180 is the CSM200 expansion trays.

3) Transfer Premium Feature Licenses: Sun offers an upgrade program that allows customers to transfer licenses from an older system to a newer system for US$750 per license. The old license / premium feature must be retired from the legacy array and customers must fill out the Certificate of Destruction on the transferred feature(s) for the legacy array. The legacy array can still be deployed without the usage of the "transferred" premium features.

Upgrading from Sun StorageTek 6140 Array to the 6180

Customers have two options: