Sun Creates Virtual Tape Library from Thumper Server

Published: August 9, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, when the top brass at Sun Microsystems was going over its financial results for fiscal 2007 ended in June, the company had hinted that it was in the midst of a major transition in its storage product lineup that would see it emphasize designs similar to the "Thumper" X4500 storage server and less like legacy Sun and StorageTek products. This week, Sun has announced a spin-off of the Thumper server, a virtual tape library called the VTL Value, to distinguish it from more expensive StorageTek VTLs.

The Thumper storage server was launched as part of the "Galaxy" family of Opteron-based servers back in July 2006, and was not part of the September 2005 announcements that saw the debut of Sun's homegrown Opteron server designs. (Sun had previously sold Opteron servers that it acquired on an OEM basis from Newisys, a server maker that is part of contract IT manufacturer Sanmina-SCI.) The Thumper box, which Sun calls a data server, is a tweaked version of its X4100 two-socket Galaxy server that has four dozen SATA disk ports embedded on the motherboard. Specifically, it has six eight-port SATA controllers that allow up to 48 SATA disks to be attached to this single box and crammed into a 4U form factor. Sun originally supported 250 GB or 500 GB SATA drives in the Thumper server, yielding 12 TB or 24 TB of capacity in the box. What is significant about Thumper is that it delivers 2 GB/sec of sustained I/O from disk to memory, which rivals the bandwidth that it takes using much more expensive Fibre Channel links between a server and SAN. And perhaps most importantly for Sun, the Thumper box is based on Solaris 10 and its related 128-bit Zettabyte File System (ZFS), and it implements the RAID Z data protection algorithm that is part of ZFS, which means Sun did not have to try to cram eight RAID 5 disk controllers into the Thumper box. By using Solaris 10 and ZFS, Sun has been able to cut a lot of costs out of the storage server while at the same time providing very sophisticated technology.

The high-bandwidth, compact, relatively low-cost nature of the Thumper server is why Greenplum, an upstart provider of open source data warehousing software, has worked with Sun to create a data warehousing appliance, called the DW Appliance. Thumper is an important part of several big supercomputer deals Sun has signed since the Galaxy machines were launched, and is also a backbone in the Streaming Server it launched back in May.

And now, the Thumper server is the core element of a virtual tape library, which looks like a real tape library as far as the server operating system and tape backup software running on it is concerned, but which is really a set of disk drives and software that is pretending to be a tape drive. The VTL then hooks up to real tape drives, which can be used to archive data separately from the servers and storage arrays that have production data on them, thereby eliminating the backup window that haunts data centers.

The StorageTek VTL Value is built using 500 GB SATA drives. It has two or four 2 GB/sec Fibre Channel ports to link it to servers and storage area networks. The device implements 16 virtual tape libraries, with a total of 128 virtual tape drives, and 1,024 virtual tape cartridges. Buying a real tape library from Sun with the StorageTek label on it that had this capacity would cost a fortune. Of course, tape media is a lot less expensive than disk media, but then again, it is a lot slower, too.

Sun is only charging a slight premium for a Thumper configured as a VTL device--and for good reason, since it doesn't really have to change much inside the box except software. A base X4500 with 48 250 GB disks (for a total of 12 TB of space), two 2.6 GHz dual-core Opteron 285s, 16 GB of main memory, plus Solaris 10 and ZFS costs $32,995. Moving up to 500 GB disks increases the price to $69,995. When the StorageTek VTL Value label is slapped on the Thumper server, it costs $84,995. It is unclear what the exact configuration of that box is, but presumably it is a reasonably hefty server configuration; this box does use 48 of the 500 GB disks--that much is known.

Now, the question is whether or not Sun can charge $15,000 (or more, if the underlying server configuration is skinnier than the top-end Thumper box) for a piece of VTL software riding on top of Solaris 10 and ZFS. The entry price for Sun's StorageTek Virtual Tape Library Plus box is $135,000, and that box was based on a four-socket Sun V40z Opteron-based server and housed 48 SATA drives in a much larger chassis. This StorageTek VTL Plus machine offers up to 224 TB of raw capacity, and after RAID 5 is implemented on the drives, usable capacity drops to 168 TB. (That price does not include the cost of a full complement of disk drives, by the way.)

The Thumper server was selling in the fourth quarter at what would amount to a $100 million annual run rate, and while this part of Sun's business is growing fast, it is still relatively small compared to where it needs to be and against the declines in the StorageTek business that Sun paid $4.1 billion to acquire in August 2005.

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