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) |
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Editor's comments:- once upon a time -
Sun had unique opportunities for exploiting
SSDs as I wrote in my
(2004) article
Why Sun Should
Acquire an SSD Company. Instead they did nothing for years (and many wrong
things in storage) and thereby missed an early opportunity to become a
leader in the SSD accelerated server business.
Will Oracle do any
better? See the article -
SSDs and Sun-Oracle - past failures / future challenges
SPARC
History - 1987 to 2010 - chronicles the rise and fall of the SPARC
server market viewed from my vantage point in it first as a Sun VAR in the
1980s (before SPARC), then as a SPARC oem in the SPARCstation 1 era, and, from
1991 as editor of the most influential buyers guide in the Sun hardware market
in the 1990s - the SPARC
Product Directory.
Below are Sun's milestones from
SSD Market
History
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.
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.
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| There
are
hundreds
of articles about SSDs on StorageSearch.com |
Here, below, are some
examples.
- RAM Cache
Ratios in flash SSDs - it's important to know the underlying RAM cache
architecture - even if you're happy with the R/W and IOPS performance.
- 2010 - 1st Fizz
in the SSD Bubble? - even the dogs in the street know this is going to be a
multibillion dollar market. Greed will play as big a part as technology in
shaping the
SSD year ahead.
- the pros and cons of
using SSD ASAPs - auto tuning SSD appliances are a new category of SSD
which entered the market in the 2nd half of 2009 to accelerate servers without
needing human tune-ups. How can you tell if they are right for you? And how
well do they work?
- the Problem
with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs - long established as a useful performance
modeling metric - this article explains why some specs are exaggerated when
applied to flash SSDs - or predict the wrong results for many common
applications.
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