Sun Launches Kickers to StorageTek Disk Arrays

Published: August 15, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Modular disk array sales represent a $13 billion market worldwide, and one of the reasons why Sun Microsystems spent billions of dollars acquiring StorageTek last year was so it could get a bigger piece of that pie. Last week, Sun announced the first two of four new modular disk arrays that it has plans to launch this year, which the company believes will give it the ability to compete head-to-head with EMC, IBM, Hitachi, and Hewlett-Packard, who together get the lion's share of this market these days.

For decades, vendors have always put their best hardware and software goodies into their enterprise-class IT products, and then gradually migrated these features into midrange products that are adopted by a much larger customer base. Modular storage arrays, which were invented roughly 15 years ago, may not have had all the bells and whistles of high-end arrays, but they were built to start small and allow customers to add capacity and features as they needed without having to upgrade to high-end arrays, which tend to cost more. The cost of modular storage has fallen quite dramatically over the years, and units typically cost well under $300,000 for heavy configurations, about half of what a similar amount of capacity will cost on an enterprise class product, which obviously has a lot more expansion and often a lot more sophisticated software. Jason Schaffer, Sun's director of product management for the new modular storage line introduced last week, says that companies can buy modular storage for $5 to $6 per MB. And for that money, vendors are pouring on the features so they don't have to cut that price to $4 per MB. Products in the same class as the boxes Sun announced last week include EMC's CX3 and Clariion arrays, IBM's DS6000 and smaller arrays, HP's EVA arrays and its bigger MSA models, and Hitachi's TagmaStore WMS and AMS units.

With the StorageTek 6140 and 6540 modular arrays Sun launched, Schaffer says that Sun is delivering kickers to Sun's own 6130 arrays and StorageTek's 210, 240, 280, and 380 arrays that offer roughly twice the density and twice the performance of these arrays. (Sun will back up those performance claims by running SPC-2 benchmarks.)

The 6140 array comes with two RAID controllers designed by LSI Logic, and has 3U drive trays that support up to 16 disk drives. The controller comes with 4 GB of cache memory and has eight 4 Gbps Fibre Channel host-facing ports. The array supports SATA-2 disks with up to 500 GB capacities and Fibre Channel disks with up to 300 GB capacities; Schaffer says that the average customer chooses 146 GB, 10K RPM FC drives in this class of array. The dual LSI controllers in the box supports up to 112 drives, and RAID level 1, 3, 5, 10, and 50 data protection levels are supported; RAID 6, which involved double drive parity, is coming at some point in the future. A base 6140 array with five 500 GB SATA-2 drives (2.5 TB) costs $25,000, and it includes the two controllers and the full cache.

The disk drawers used in the 6140 can be moved up to the 6540 array, which is a product that doesn't just support 4 Gbps Fibre Channel ports, but Fibre Channel links inside the guts of the array, from back to front, and expandability to 224 drives behind the dual LSI Logic RAID controllers. The 6540 can have up to 16 GB of cache as well, which can boost performance on some workloads. Schaffer says that the 6140 is aimed at direct attach as well as SAN uses, and that the 6540 is aimed at big database and supercomputing workloads, which tend to have larger data sets. With 4 GB of cache, two controllers, and the same 2.5 TB entry capacity, the 6540 array costs $85,000.

Both arrays come with some new features that Sun is going to use to grease its sales. The first is a set of 15 popular application profiles for volumes created on the arrays, which means storage administrators do not have to tune for these workloads based on trial and error. They get best practices for a particular database or email server, for instance, right out of the box, and they just pick that profile from a dropdown menu in the array management tools. The new arrays also include what Sun is calling instant-on volumes, which means once a volume is created by a storage admin, data can be immediately written to that volume and read from it, even if that volume has not been fine tuned yet. The arrays also have dynamic volume configuration, which allows admins to change the salient properties of a volume--increase its capacity, turn a RAID setting on or off, and so forth--without taking the volume offline.

The StorageTek 6140 array is in initial customer shipments now, and will be generally available in about 20 days. The 6540 array will begin shipping on August 17 and will be generally available about a month later. Both machines support Unix, Windows, and Linux servers, with Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX being the Unixes supported. Mainframes are not supported on these machines.