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A singular vision - "The Network Is The Computer" -
guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most
important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building
communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation
Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at
http://sun.com.
- Editor's comments:- Sun has unique opportunities for exploiting SSDs as I
wrote in my (2004) article
Why Sun Should
Acquire an SSD Company.
Jonathan
Schwartz, Sun's CEO (or his ghostwriter) reads
storagesearch.com. His June
2008 blog -
Anything But a
Flash in the Pan cited projections from the article -
Flash Memory vs. Hard
Disks - Which Will Win?.
And in September 2008 - Sun
employee, Marc Hamilton's blog -
SSD's
Everywhere cited our
SSD Buyer's Guide.
In
November 2008 - Sun launched its 7000 family of rackmount NAS systems
- which includes hybrid HDD / flash SSD arrays. Sun says its Solaris ZFS can
optimize the SSDs intelligently as a part of a storage pool. MSRP for a 4U
system with 44TB of 7,200 RPM hard drives, 36GB flash SSD and 64GB RAM is
$117,995.
In March 2009 -
Sun Microsystems launched
its new Sun Flash
Analyzer - a free Java tool to help users determine how much their (Solaris,
Windows and Linux) servers could benefit from SSD acceleration. The company also
launched a try before you buy marketing promotion for its servers which have
Sun branded 2.5" SLC flash SSDs pre-integrated. The 32GB SATA SSDs have
sequential R/W upto 250MB/s and 170MB/s respectively. Random R/W IOPS are upto
35,000 and 3,300 respectively (4k blocks). Endurance is 3 years - assuming max
write speed and 100% write duty cycle.
In April 2009 - Oracle
announced
an agreement to acquire Sun Microsystems for
approximately $7.4 billion. (Which is similar to Sun's own total spend on
acquiring storage
companies. Thereby valuing Sun's server business as zero - or vice versa.)
In
May 2009 - Sun
Microsystems announced it has
improved
its hybrid rackmount storage systems to support an additional 600GB of
flash SSD cache (compared to the current 64GB internal limit) for enhanced
application performance.
The Sun Storage
7310
is available today and starts at a price of $40,165.
Editor's
comments:- terabyte SSDs become commercially available in
2002 - so
Sun's initial product offering last November - which supported a mere 36GB per
4U rack - was a sure sign that the company either didn't know what it was doing
- or was being overly cautious.
There are plenty of
rackmount SSD
vendors in the market - and soon there will be hundreds more. There's wide
diversity in product architectures (open versus proprietary) and applications
experience in this part of the SSD market (ranging from months in the case of
Sun - to more than a decade for companies like
Solid Data Systems and
Texas Memory Systems).
If
you are thinking of buying an SSD from Sun - timing the purchase is a something
to think about. In recent years Sun used to steeply discount towards the end of
its quarter. I'm not sure how being part of
Oracle will
affect that. See also:-
Hybrid Storage
Drives
Sun
- editor mentions in STORAGEsearch.com
Sun
- editor mentions in SPARC Product Directory
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