By William Fellows
Sun Microsystems Inc will begin overhauling its mish mash of disk arrays with a modular storage architecture from its January acquisition of Maxstrat Corp when it sends a mid-to-high end product out on early release next month. Sun hopes to capitalize on the burgeoning demand for storage as companies move increasing amounts of commercial data online.
The Maxstrat ‘brick’ architecture, code-named Noble and referred to as a network storage ‘appliance’ will serve as a building block for new arrays that will be moved into the Sun world as the cornerstone of Sun’s storage strategy the company told ComputerWire. It will replace Sun’s entire storage line, Sun said.
Sun says that storage now accounts for 22 cents of every dollar of revenue. It says reports suggesting storage accounts for more than 50% of a system sale are wrong, although the value of the storage component is increasing quickly.
The Noble technology, three years in the making, has been in beta for six months and will be generally available in the first quarter of next year. Sun bought Maxstrat specifically for Noble, which it will productize as member of its StorEdge product line. The initial footprint of the system is designed for data warehousing, high performance computing and ISP markets. The company claims it will offer the highest throughput performance on the market.
To create Noble, Maxstrat stripped out key technologies from its high-end Gen5-S storage servers and implemented them on a 3U rack unit with controllers that enable it to be used for a range of application environments. An entry-level Fibre Channel system with 18Gb drives is 144Gb. It’s targeted at users that need 100Gb or more capacity, said to be the sweet spot of Sun’s storage market. The Gen5-S product line is optimized for the high- capacity, high-performance SCSI, Fibre Channel and HIPPI markets and is used in some top tier supercomputer accounts.
Sun says the Maxstrat ‘brick’ will simplify storage, enabling customers easily add capacity as required. It will not be touted as a point solution because the Noble includes Maxstrat’s application personality tuning (APT) software. Sun says this enables a user to take the same box, turn the dials and it becomes an NFS server or HPC box or OLTP system. The company says it will produce other versions of Noble for smaller capacity requirements including general purpose database hosting.
The ‘brick’ is just one part of Sun’s long-term storage strategy, which has three guiding principles. One is a belief that companies will move from proprietary to ‘open’ solutions, including use of its forthcoming Jiro APIs for writing cross- platform storage management APIs in Java. Second is that discrete ‘box’ services will be replaced by services distributed on a network, including storage area networks. Third is that modular storage subsystem technologies like Noble will replace monolithic designs.
Sun is already moving programs hosted on the encore server over to Solaris, which will enable them to be used in conjunction with the Maxstrat array and other storage subsystems. They include SnapShot, which Sun says is the equivalent of EMC Corp’s Instant Image, and Remote Data Copy, which acts like PowerPath.
Sun claims its A3500 and A5000 RAID arrays won’t be replaced until the second quarter of 2001. They will be upgraded next month with Fibre Channel controllers to the front-end. Sun doesn’t do Fibre Channel all the way to disk.
Sun claims it is the biggest supplier of Unix-based storage, having sold 3 petabytes on its A5000 StorEdge arrays alone. The number two player is EMC Corp. However what Sun covets is the market for ‘open’ storage systems that can be used in conjunction with different operating systems, including Windows NT. Sun says this is the fastest growing piece of its storage business. In this market Sun claims to be the number two supplier behind Compaq Computer Corp but ahead of IBM Corp and EMC. Encroachment into NT markets is leading the charge, Sun claims. Sun claims to be shifting 12Tb of storage a day. However, a survey it recently carried amongst its users suggest only 8% are implementing storage area networks (SANs) now, while 10% are planning to develop SANs in the next 12 to 18 months. Real implementation will begin in 2002/2003 Sun estimates.
Sun believes network attached storage is useful in some environments and will leverage the Maxstrat brick to encourage the development of private NAS loops to which a limited number of devices can be attached. Software drivers will eventually enable Fibre Channel fabrics to support a theoretical 16 million nodes, up from just 127 now.
Toothpaste giant Colgate uses Sun storage to host its 1.2Tb SAP database, claimed to be the biggest R/3 production database in the world. Colgate says it will turn off the lights of its last outsourced mainframe at the end of the year. The clutch of supporting RS/6000s will bite the dust too. Colgate says it wants network storage not clustered storage, which requires systems to be disconnected, reconnected and rebooted when capacity is added or take offline. It has a 15-minute data copy delay across the organization to help prevent user disasters, the most likely source of data loss. Employees have 15 minutes to recover data after making errors before the new data status is copied across the organization. Colgate had 2Tb storage in 1996. It has 18Tb now and claims to provide 99.8% uptime to its users.
Steven Bulmer, director of technology at $100m IT services and technology supplier Allied Group Inc believes it unlikely that discrete storage entities are unlikely to be replaced by common storage management services for another four or five years. While the storage market lumbers towards 100Mbps Fibre Channel delivery there are still challenges, Bulmer says. The 126 device limit per FC loop must be overcome along with fault isolation in switched environments, the ability to add national or international storage networks is still beyond the limits of FC and out-of-band applications must be developed to oversee multi-vendor storage networks, while vendor incompatibility remains problematic for the development of the industry as a whole. Bulmer advises building small FC storage loops and warns against booting directly off a storage area network.
Meantime Sun reportedly isn’t getting enough high-end UltraSparc II chips to meet demand. The company says it is not considering a new a new UltraSparc architecture specifically for its high-end servers to close its performance gap with Hewlett-Packard Co. Sun system need 1.5 UltraSparc processors to match an HP PA-RISC from HP.
UltraSparc III Cheetah chips are expected to show up in workstations and servers early next year before finding their way into high-end Serengeti servers by this time next year said president and COO Ed Zander last week.
