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Sun Microsystems - circa 2009 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.
see also:-
Sun
Microsystems - editor mentions (1991 to 2010)
Sun is now part
of Oracle. See also:-
acquisitions in the
SSD market.
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In May 2004 - Zsolt Kerekes
(editor of SPARC Product
Directory and StorageSearch.com)
published a provocative article -
Why Sun Should
Acquire an SSD Company - which explored the idea of how Sun could fix its
business problems related to server speed problems and me-too storage systems
in a bold move to become a leader in the enterprise SSD market. (We now know
that didn't happen but the analysis still makes interesting reading.)
In
October 2004
- Sun Microsystems signed
an agreement to resell rackmount SSD accelerators from
Texas Memory Systems.
The RamSan product line from TMS was later acquired by
IBM and renamed to
FlashSystems.
In June 2008 -
Jonathan
Schwartz, Sun's CEO's blog -
Anything
But a Flash in the Pan cited projections from the article -
Flash Memory vs. Hard
Disks - Which Will Win?.
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 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
starts at a price of $40,165.
In October 2009 -
Sun Microsystems
launched
a new 1U rackmount
SSD - the F5100
Flash Array ($45,995 upwards) - which has 16
SAS ports and provides
upto 1.92TB capacity. R/W IOPS are upto 1.6M and 1.2M respectively (for a system
populated with 80 SSD modules).
Sun also launched the
FlashFire
F20 - a 96GB SLC flash PCIe
SSD with 100k read and 84k write IOPS. R/W rates are upto 1092MB/s and
501MB/s respectively. The card also includes a
SAS controller.
In January
2010 - the
EU
cleared Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
The Sun brand (and discussion about Sun flash SSDs) now continues as a
part of the OS, server and storage product mix offered by
Oracle
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there was a lot more to Sun than SSDs
and storage
In the notes above I've only talked about Sun
in the SSD market. That was a small dimension of a their overall business
impact.
If you're interested in how Sun impacted server market
history - take a look at some of these archived articles and resources from the
SPARC Product Directory
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