Codenamed Thumper, the 4U device will be badged as the Sun Fire X4500 server when it ships later this year, and will combine up to 24TB of ATA disk drives with a Sun Fire server running twin 2.6GHz dual core AMD Opteron processors, and Sun’s only recently launched Solaris 10 OS and ZFS file system.

Sun is describing the X4500 as a hybrid device that combines a disk array and server, so reducing cost and density, and providing high-speed data transfer between disk and processor memory.

Unlike other arrays, the X4500 is not designed to be installed on a SAN where its capacity can be shared by multiple servers, although it can be a node on a SAN.

It features only two PCI-X slots to take Infiniband, Ethernet or Fibre Channel adaptors. In comparison, EMC’s Clariion CX-3 arrays all feature eight FC ports, while NetApp’s mid-range FAS3000 boxes feature the same number of both on-board Ethernet ports and FC ports, plus PCI-X expansion slots.

Sun cited three typical applications for the device. The first is in HPC applications, such as that of early X4500 user the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which has built a 1TB cluster of Thumpers using the Lustre cluster file system, which are feeding data to Sun Fire X4600 servers.

Tokyo Tech provided a glowing testimonial for Sun’s press launch. The X4500 is proof that careful, clever engineering will result in a solution that has never before been achieved, said the institute’s head of research infrastructure, Satoshi Matsuoka.

The second application is an area where Sun said customers want fast transfers of data from disk to server memory, for example running data-warehousing software from start-up Greenplum, cited as an ISV supporter of Thumper. Greenplum’s applications loads data into memory before running database queries.

Because we’re transferring data on-board, we’re doing it at 4Gbytes per second, not the 4Gbits per second of a Fibre Channel SAN, said Hanxi Chen, group manager of systems at Sun. By placing the storage in the same box as the server, the Sun box also eliminates the need to buy SAN switching gear to link the two.

The third application cited by Sun is in the processing of video data, where again Thumper’s data transfer rate comes into play.

Currently the X4500 only provides file-level data access, but Sun is not describing the box as a NAS device, because it does not feature any of the data replication or management software found on NAS gear sold into the mainstream commercial market. At some future date, Sun said it will add iSCSI target code to the X4500.

The box does not sport any RAID controllers, but instead implements RAID in software on the Sun Fire server. While this might not match the performance of dedicated RAID controllers, it does lower costs and allow the box to support multiple RAID levels, Sun said. And that’s RAID runnning in an Opteron processor, Chen said.