Sun Jumps Into Flash Storage Pool

By David Rubinstein

June 4, 2008 — Jumping on the Flash bandwagon, Sun Microsystems is introducing today new solid-state storage arrays that use changes in the Solaris ZFS file system to improve scalability and provide better performance for applications.

Sun "is seeing a tipping point for high-performance storage needs," said Shane Sigler, CTO for Sun systems marketing. "Flash lets us improve the balance between storage subsystems and applications above them, based on where the CPUs are headed."

With more processing power driving performance, the retrieval of data by applications needs to be fast and predictable, so keeping this data in extensible caches in solid-state pools rather than back on a spinning disk better meets those needs at a lower power cost, he explained.

Flash, Sigler said, provides greater capacity than memory in that Flash chips are denser, so "you can pack more in," as he put it.

Solaris ZFS has been optimized for Flash technology, with the write cache able to be split onto a solid-state storage pool, and main memory and solid-state drives used for read caching. Sigler pointed out that Sun is working with Intel around solid-state and NAND technologies to build a hybrid storage solution that increases the number of read and write IOPs while lowering the cost per IOP. This is accomplished with a mix of both disk and solid-state drives providing the capacity to handle the load generated by multicore chips, he noted.

The file system also provides the ability to snapshot and create checkpoints, and it has 128-bit scalability, among other features designed to facilitate the use of hybrid storage pools. Some of the optimizations also happen behind the scenes to help developers who in the past have written applications to avoid touching the disks. "Now, they can leverage storage instead of avoiding it," he said, adding that the storage team at Sun is working with the Java development team on these optimizations.

Sigler said the fact that the arrays are part of Sun's Open Storage solution "gives us an advantage with the operating system and developers within the open-source community to take a leading role" in creating applications that leverage the new performance features.

Sun Storage Flash Arrays will be available in the second half of this year, and Sigler said that Flash will be an option in all the company's servers by 2010.

Related Search Term(s): Flash, Solaris, storage hardware, Sun

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Sun Jumps Into Flash Storage Pool

By David Rubinstein

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