Sun Reports Hundreds of Customers for Its Flash-Enabled Storage 7000

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that hundreds of customers across a range of industries have purchased high-performance, eco-efficient Flash-enabled Sun Storage 7000 Systems to store more than 17 petabytes of total data, making it the fastest ramping new product in Sun’s storage portfolio ever. Continuing to add innovation to its Open Storage portfolio and Open Network Systems strategy, Sun also announced hardware capacity enhancements to the Sun Unified Storage family and an upgrade to its Analytics software, which ships with the Sun Storage 7000 line and gives storage administrators unparalleled insight into their storage systems.

"As the Open Storage revolution continues to gain traction with customers, partners and the channel, it’s radically simplifying how customers approach storage management. The unparalleled observability these unified storage systems gives customers is fast making traditional storage solutions a thing of the past," says John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.

As part of Sun’s Open Network Systems approach, Sun’s Unified Storage Systems bring speed, simplicity and savings to customers.

New technology enhancements announced include:

• Sun Storage 7000 Software upgrade 2009.Q2 – Over 15 new features added to breakthrough analytics capabilities and Windows integration. Built upon industry standard components and open source software, new functionality can be deployed quickly to support ever growing customer environments.
• Double the capacity of Sun Storage 7110 system, from two to four terabytes, making it one of the most dense in its class.
• More than tripled the capacity of Sun Storage 7210 system to 142 terabytes; these new, high-efficient systems leverage solid state disk (SSD) Flash technology.

Faced with a challenging economic climate and rapid data growth, storage operators and administrators need a way to better manage costs and save time. Based on cost efficient industry standard components and a robust software stack that leverages the tested OpenSolaris operating system (OS), Solaris ZFS, award-winning Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) and a community of independent software vendors (ISVs), the Sun Storage 7000 family can be installed and configured in under five minutes, uses three times less power and space and costs up to 75% less than traditional disk storage offerings. These systems also include the industry’s most simple and comprehensive analytics environment and includes innovative new tools to help isolate and resolve issues to minimize the impact on daily operations.

Customers, Partners and the Channel Drive Sales
Surge of Unified Storage Family
The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System family delivers breakthrough performance while radically simplifying the way customers manage storage with unprecedented speed, scale and cost savings. More than 800 customers have adopted the Sun Unified Storage family in under five months, across a wide range of deployments, including VMware virtualization, Web MySQL database/rich media and media/entertainment, as well as high-performance computing, education, government, healthcare and telecommunications. Photo, video, music and social networking Web sites have also switched to the Sun Storage 7000 platform to reduce the costs associated with storing increasing amounts of rich media content. Sun’s storage line has also proven to be an ideal platform for Solaris, Windows, and Linux consolidation projects – delivering lower cost per service with the utmost storage simplicity.

“An increasing number of customers are realizing that the benefits of their server virtualization projects can also be applied to their storage environments,” said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware. “The new Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System can offer our customers a simplified approach to virtualized storage, with NFS and data management services that help customers do more with less while enabling greater efficiency, control and choice in their datacenters."

EasySpeedy, Media Temple, Motionbox, Monash University, Canada’s TV5, University of South Florida, and other customers are among the 800 strong that have switched to a Sun Unified Storage System for dramatic time and money savings.

"Motionbox offers something unique – a safe, friendly, private online resource for individuals and families to store and share video in vivid HD quality. This naturally demands that we engineer a well tuned, highly responsive storage environment, and we have built just that around the Sun Storage 7410. My team was immediately abuzz when the 7000 series hit the market last fall. This solution was the best deal on high-capacity storage that we’d ever seen. Most important, however, the 7000 series is equally adept at serving both high-traffic videos and the ‘long tail’ of user-generated content – all on a single unit. Because our 7410 cluster comes configured with sizeable amounts of read & write cache, it can effortlessly serve content and support lots of transcoding operations across a wide spectrum of video usage patterns and the full path of a video’s lifecycle. Sun unified storage gives us the flexibility to tune and configure multiple instances of the same device for throughput or capacity or whatever our needs may be. Thanks, too, to the Sun Startup Essentials program, where I got the opportunity to discuss in-depth with Sun engineers to validate the best storage architecture to meet our intense demands," said Chris Brown, VP Engineering, Motionbox. Inc.

"During our evaluation of the OpenStorage 7410, we found that the combination of read and write biased flash storage and disk outperformed systems with four to five times the number of spinning disks (and without any read write flash). We are still evaluating these units for use in a customer facing capacity, but we are definitely going to use these units in a data retention and data processing capacity. The expandability and the analytics capabilities offered by the Sun Storage 7410 units are very enticing to us, and may allow us to make some major changes to the architecture of our storage systems,” said Joshua Barratt, CTO, Media Temple.

"After testing and optimizing the Sun unified storage solution, we were surprised and impressed to discover that Sun’s open solution was interoperable with our existing broadcast infrastructure. By prioritizing video applications, we were also able to use the solution with virtualization in our IT operation. We had considered a competitive NAS solution, but the cost was 25% greater and didn’t give us the necessary throughput. Ultimately, the combination of exceptional value, capacity, tuning of applications and Sun’s analytics led us to consolidate all data for both our IT and broadcast infrastructures on a Sun unified storage system," said Regis Harrison, director of production and technologies, TV5 Canada.

In addition, over 30 new independent software vendors and partners have certified applications for the Sun Unified Storage Systems, including VMware and Symantec. With new tools like the Hands on Lab, the channel has had a major impact in the dramatic sales growth for the Sun Unified Storage Systems.

New Mid-Market Solution for Sun Storage 7000
Sun also recently expanded its portfolio of mid-market solutions with the introduction of an Open Archive solution that pairs the Sun Storage 7110 and 7210 Unified Storage Systems and ultra-scalable Sun Fire X4140 and Sun Fire X4240 servers with industry-leading Symantec Enterprise Vault 8 software. The resulting Open Archive solution for mid-sized companies delivers tested and optimized storage and server configurations that make it easy for customers to very simply archive many different types of data, such as files/records, email, instant messaging and sharepoint content while ensuring data integrity. By using four times less power and half the footprint, the Sun and Symantec Open Archive Solution can significantly reduce storage costs, minimizing management complexity and increasing storage ROI.

Sun Eases Migration to Open Storage
With Tools and Expertise
New Sun Services for the Sun Storage 7000 Family include:

• Implementation and Assessment Services – Goes beyond standard setup and basic diagnostics of standard installation to provide select configuration and validation information. Provides the expertise to help ensure that systems are running at an optimal level right from the first installation.
• Sun Unified Storage Data Migration Services – Minimizes disruption and allows full feature functionality of new technology investments. Securely migrate data using MD5 hashing for file and security validation and speed time to ROI with Sun’s deep technical expertise and tools.