Sun squirrels away flash drive array

A service manual (pdf) for a F5100 Flash Array can be found through Sun's website - it's a product which doesn't appear on the site's product pages and hasn't been announced yet. The squirrelling-away is probably due to pre-Oracle purchase disruption. According to the manual the array, pictured below, is a rack shelf unit …

[Anonymous Coward]

Bored of Sun Hardware Talk

As a Sun Sysadmin for a number of years it pains me to see Sun continuing its downwards spiral. Like those nice people from the ministry of agriculture humanely kill cows Its time for someone to get the nailgun out before it gets any worse.

I don't see why anyone in their right mind would consider buying Sun kit when Oracle are looking to flog the hardware division to anyone who will take it. To be fair they've designed and built some amazing pieces of kit over the years but they've also released some absolute stinkers.

The Sun 7000 array with the goodness of ZFS, Solaris 10's DTRACE and now SSDs is pretty cool and if this was spun off into a separate storage company then you might just persuade more people to buy into the product. Even though they are pretty impressive if you were a Windows/ESX admin you probably wouldn't have them on your shopping list primarily because of the connotations of their Sun badge.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun squirrels away flash drive array

So, instead of chewing through your power cables like a normal squirrel, this thing just sucks them dry?

[Anonymous Coward]

EMC/Cisco agreement?

Interesting that with this product, the Sun 7000 array, the Sun Blade 6048/6000, it seems like Sun has all the components and more compared to Cisco's UCS except for the marketing capability that Cisco's marketing organization brings. The advantage Sun has is that they don't have to partner with EMC. In fact with Oracle's potential application/database stack, they could build complete solutions.

With the Oracle acquisition of Sun, the combined organization could have finally had similar marketing capabilities to Cisco starting today had the EU approved the deal...

Unfortunately, the EU is worried about stiffling Open source software, which is hilarious because that's the best part about Open Source is even if a vendor like MySQL (pre-Sun acquisition), EnterpriseDB, RedHat, Novel, Sun, etc would have gone out of business the code is there to re-ignite the project.

Besides, even without Sun, as I understand it Oracle owns the IP for InnoDB, MySQL's most popular storage engine. So how exactly the EU thinks this warrants more investigation than what they put into it over the summer and what the US DoJ put into it is beyond me. Good job EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. You deserve a medal for being asinine.

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC

If you're bored, there is a simple solution - don't read it!

There - problem solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC

Actually, we will continue to buy and recommend Sun products where it meets our client needs. I don't see that there is any great risk that, even if Oracle sell off the hardware division, which is very unlikely in the short term, that buying any hardware product is going to be much of a problem. When you consider how reliable the kit is, and how fast most Dell or HP kit becomes obsolete, I think I'll stick with Sun.

There is far too much unrealistic FUD out there, and imagine how competition will go without SPARC and Sun. I'd expect AMD et. al. to go fairly rapidly, followed by Itanium, which will leave you with x86 from Intel and P series from IBM which will price itself out of the market.

And people are worried about MySQL FM.

[Anonymous Coward]

About all FUD going on here

I work at a large bank and I hate SUNs crappy hardware and love IBMs Power servers. But after we benched SUNs T5440 against a few IBM Powerservers, we dont see any incentive to continue with Power servers, as they were crushed by the SPARC Niagara CPUs. We are now migrating away from the very expensive Power servers to SUN machines. I hate that, but Power servers doesnt give the oomph as SUNs machines does.

/Kebabbert

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds Great. How Much?

Sounds like a much better solution vs. adding SSD drives to storage arrays that are the form-factor of traditional HDD disk drives (when there is no need to be) ... as well as behind behind other potential bottlenecks that are in a traditional HDD array that was not designed for SSD's running 1000 faster I/O).

This looks like Sun's solution avoids all those issues (small footprint and no bottlenecks) and it uses the Common Management Software that Sun's other arrays use so I won't have to learn how to use yet another Management Software product.

Hard to tell. The PDF link seems broken now (guess Sun got word this leaked)

[Anonymous Coward]

Squirrels

From what I've heard, the original squirrels were not ROHS compliant. Sun had find new squirrels first. This was the main reason for the delay.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I even look at Sun any more?

The phenomenal speed of Nehalem chipsets from Intel together with cloud computing technologies for parallel scaling makes Unix from Sun/IBM/HP obsolete, with the exception of the truly stubborn application vendors who refuse to port their gear to Linux/Windows.

yes, I know Solaris is a fine operating system, but I cannot justify $500K of Unix gear any more when the equivalent in X86-64 costs a tenth of that amount.

Beer, because you always need a stiff drink after cutting a P.O. for Unix hardware.

[Anonymous Coward]

RE: Why would I even look at Sun any more?

Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 8th September 2009 01:24 GMT, "The phenomenal speed of Nehalem chipsets from Intel together with cloud computing technologies for parallel scaling makes Unix from Sun/IBM/HP obsolete... yes, I know Solaris is a fine operating system, but I cannot justify $500K of Unix gear any more when the equivalent in X86-64 costs a tenth of that amount."

The MPP processing under Nehalem is certainly not equivalent to SMP under SPARC.

If this was the real argument, then you would be moving to OpenSolaris on Intel or AMD with:

- Unified 128 Bit ZFS File System & Volume Manager

- Robust System Virtualization with Solaris Containers with virtually no overhead

- DTrace for Development Optimization & Production Debugging

- Unified kernel level CIFS & NFS architecture

- Virtualized Network Architecture with

- Unified Services Architecture

Solaris on Intel/Amd - greater functionality at less the cost than alternative operating systems.

[David Halko]

Lots of references to the F5100 Flash Array

There have been lots of references to the F5100 Flash Array across Sun's documentation, for months now. Firmware patches have been released and management software has already been updated.

I doubt release of this product is very far off.