Open Storage: storage that learns with your business
The introduction of Sun's flash-based 7000 family has driven a significant amount of interest from the industry, customers and partners. Gartner's Roger Cox, “[Open Storage] does have promise, in the sense that this can have a major impact in terms of reducing costs for storage, particularly in today's economic environment with people not having the kind of money they've had in the past. Storage data doesn't stop growing, and they have to replace products that have reached their [end of] lifecycle."
Based on industry standard components and the popular Open Source ZFS file system, these platforms deliver massive price/performance benefits – up to 90 per cent – against proprietary NAS vendors.
Flash memory optimized
Open Storage is about more than just cost savings on hardware.
Flash memory is rapidly making its way into data centres due to its exceptional performance and its ability to respond to requests to read and write information up to 100’s of times faster than traditional disk drives.
Flash also requires little/no power, dissipates no heat and can withstand vibration, temperature extremes and shock. Incorporate this into an Open Storage device and you have a storage device heavily optimised with flash memory.
Intelligent storage
The Sun Storage 7000 has one remarkably interesting attribute: it learns. The longer it's doing its job, interacting with applications and serving data, the faster it becomes.
The 7000 uses algorithms - instead of storage admins - to adaptively place the most frequently accessed data where it will be fastest to retrieve: flash memory.
The internal operating system, OpenSolaris, paired with ZFS, actually "warms up" the device after it starts working - it watches traffic, notices which files are being most frequently accessed, and caches them in flash.
The Sun Storage 7000 can then use far slower and less power consumptive disks for the infrequently accessed data.
Customers realise the potential of Open Storage
Monash University, an international research and education institution based in Victoria, Australia, needed a cost effective, network-unified storage solution that combines Open Source software with industry-standard hardware, meeting the growing demand of the University's research and academic community for a high performing, scalable, open standard and interfaced solution.
To address these needs, Monash University chose a Sun Open Storage solution based on the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System and Sun Storage J4400 arrays.
The Sun solution was chosen over competitive offerings due to:
- The University's confidence in Sun's approach to Open Storage and OpenSolaris
- Roadmap for Solaris ZFS
- Simplified management features with easy to use graphical tools and analytic features that provide real-time visibility to analyse and optimise storage.
What does Open Storage mean for you?
The combination of commodity flash and disk components, alongside Open Source software leads to a highly efficient storage device.
This combination means that Open Storage can deliver the most retrieved files faster than even the most efficient enterprise disks enabling customers to spend radically less on the device, on power, cooling and space.
That's the basic premise behind the Sun Storage 7000, to use systems innovation to drive performance, eliminate latency and radically cut purchase and operating cost.
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