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Hardware Sun Announces Its Own Line of SSDs
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - June 4, 2008 1:40 PM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 19 comment(s) - last by Segerstein.. on Jun 6 at 3:50 AM
Sun is betting big on the SSD in enterprise environments

Sun has put its weight behind solid state drives (SSDs) and is in the initial stages of planning a business strategy around the emerging technology. Sun executive vice president John Fowler believes the SSD is the future of enterprise computing.

Fowler and other Sun executives told reporters today that Sun would be integrating SSDs into the majority of its hardware and software offerings. Looking back, Sun was on this path before this announcement since it already has a version of its Solaris ZFS software available that is optimized for use with SSDs.

Sun announced that it will offer its own line of SSD drives later this year intended to give users of its hardware and software improved performance, power savings and reliability. Sun will offer 2.5” flash-based drives by the second half of 2008 and 3.5-inch drives will be introduced later. Fowler is quoted by eWeek saying, “Flash today is not about bulk storage … but it’s about performance. The question for us is going to be adoption rate … because people’s adoption rates of storage is really variable.”

According to Fowler, Sun expects the adoption of SSDs in the enterprise environment to begin in earnest this year for customers running high-performance computing environments. Mainstream enterprise will begin adopting SSDs later.

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff told eWeek, “It’s possible all this will occur. But these things don’t happen overnight, particularly in storage, where enterprises are very conservative.” The risk in Sun putting so much weight behind SSDs according to Haff is that enterprise customers may not buy the products.

Sun isn’t the only major league manufacturer betting big on SSDs for the future of enterprise computing. Intel’s own line of SSD drives were going through in-house testing in April and should be on the market later this year.

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Way of the future.
By jadeskye on 6/4/2008 2:15:11 PM , Rating: 5
It's good to see so much interest in SSDs for the larger companies. hopefully all of this will lead to faster market penetration of SSDs and me being able to buy 10 and raid them :p

without taking out a second mortgage...




RE: Way of the future.
By PAPutzback on 6/4/2008 2:25:10 PM , Rating: 2
I agree. If you get the enterprise market to pay the price for early adoption on top of there being so much competition I think prices will drop much quicker than previously expected. I am really surprised they don't mention the power and heat savings also. I am hoping this will cause prices to fall faster on the large capacity mechanical drives. I'd really like to see 2TB drives come in at less than 200 when they come out this fall\spring 08. Then it might be feasible to buy Blu-Ray movies and store them on a server.


RE: Way of the future.
By jadeskye on 6/4/2008 3:09:15 PM , Rating: 2
Before hi-def i would have thought you crazy to want 2TB drives. but now i see the nessesity.

but yes, you're right, i hope so too.

i see many years ahead where people have SSD drives for appilications and traditional drives for storage before a full SSD era.


RE: Way of the future.
By onwisconsin on 6/4/2008 3:47:42 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
I'd really like to see 2TB drives come in at less than 200 when they come out this fall\spring 08.


Sorry, I'm probably really misreading your post, but didn't we pass Spring 2008 already? And Fall is coming soon. I'll be happy if I could find a 64-80GB SSD used in Battleship Mtron for that much ($200)


RE: Way of the future.
By Leirith on 6/4/2008 7:24:12 PM , Rating: 3
Earth has two hemispheres!


RE: Way of the future.
By krwhite on 6/4/2008 9:52:50 PM , Rating: 3
awesome


RE: Way of the future.
By Alpha4 on 6/4/2008 5:03:14 PM , Rating: 3
Thinking along the same lines I calculated that, as space becomes tight, its cheaper to invest in discounted External 500GB+ HDDs than it is to purchase bluray media for my burner.


RE: Way of the future.
By fxyefx on 6/4/2008 6:25:42 PM , Rating: 2
Howard Hughes couldn't have put it better himself.


Maybe
By DeepBlue1975 on 6/4/2008 2:25:54 PM , Rating: 3
This can look unexciting from a home user standpoint, but the fact that major players in the corporate server arena are giving serious thrust to the SSD ship is great news.
Corporate environments aren't afraid of the cost if the solution can prove profitable in the long run and in the whole datacenter context.

SSDs for them mean less needs for those huge, power hungry and afterburner-like noisy aircons which, less power required from the disks themselves, vastly better access times which is more critical in heavy multiuser environments than STR is, less likeability to breakdown...

And for us it means that, if they start paying for that, SSD s will get better research funding, and their prices will be helped further down if those who pay the big bucks do it at discretion.

I can't wait to get a good, not so expensive SSD...
By the time being, I'll have to settle for changing my 3yr old, 3 platter, 300gb drive for a new 640gb, 2 platter one or a 750gb, 4 platter one if I can't get the former.
And I really hope that this new HDD I'll be buying in the next days will be the last one. If I keep the new one for e years, I guess SSD prices by 2011 should be starting to look almost competitive to HDD ones, maybe enough to decide to put extra cash on them.

By now I just can't simply justify spending $600 on a lesser quality 128gb SSD. I'd rather spend that kind of money on more ram and a better processor, or as I did a few days ago, on a better screen.




RE: Maybe
By Brian23 on 6/4/2008 3:58:54 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
e years


I loled when I read that. :)


RE: Maybe
By DeepBlue1975 on 6/4/2008 4:11:01 PM , Rating: 2
LOL that was really stupid of mine as I meant three years.
But now that I think about it, my drive really has about e years instead of three, as I had it as replacement on mid august 2005 (it's a refurb unit, the "new one" I had before died on me after 3 months of use, which in turn was the replacement for one that just was DOA, so I had to get 3 drives of the same model till I got a good one...)


RE: Maybe
By Segerstein on 6/6/2008 3:50:27 AM , Rating: 2
e years is approximately 3 years :)

e = 2.71828

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_const...


Technical Question
By Reclaimer77 on 6/4/2008 2:40:07 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Sun was on this path before this announcement since it already has a version of its Solaris ZFS software available that is optimized for use with SSDs.


This is just over my head I guess. How do you optimize software for use with a storage device ? Wouldn't the OS treat an SSD the same as it would a hard drive ? Are we talking something down to the machine language ?

I just assume an SSD will perform at its maximum regardless of what software is being run on it. Its I/O right ?




RE: Technical Question
By tayhimself on 6/4/2008 4:33:07 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
TextThis is just over my head I guess. How do you optimize software for use with a storage device ? Wouldn't the OS treat an SSD the same as it would a hard drive ? Are we talking something down to the machine language ?

I just assume an SSD will perform at its maximum regardless of what software is being run on it. Its I/O right ?

Negative. There is a lot of work done to optimize head movement. If you have to access data spread across 5 tracks on a disk you want to move your head to the nearest one, then the next etc etc. It gets far more complicated than this of course. You have filesystem journals, allocation tables, etc to also consider and possibly optimize for SSD. In a way its simpler than platter based disk access because it is less constrained, but manufacturers have to undo the work done for platter based disks.


RE: Technical Question
By Bladen on 6/4/2008 4:35:20 PM , Rating: 2
I think by 'optimized', they might mean 'pages the disk less often' or something like that.

However, that is purely a guess.


RE: Technical Question
By amanojaku on 6/4/2008 4:43:40 PM , Rating: 2
You're correct, the SSD is treated like any other read/write medium. Saying ZFS is designed to "optimize SSD" is marketing BS, but true nonetheless. WTF?!? Read on...

The ZFS file system is optimized to improve the performance, space utilization and/or lifetime of ANY storage medium, past, present or future. It was expected that cheap storage, particularly flash-based storage, would be used in the future (ZFS debuted in 2004.) Here's some of the highlights of its design, lifted from a few sources:

1) Variable block sizes from 512B to 128KB within the same file system if compression is enabled
a) No fragmentation
b) No wasted space

2) Copy-on-write design
a) Turns random writes into sequential writes
b) Intrinsically hot-spot-free (disk cluster or SSD cell)

3) Dynamic striping across all physical devices
a) One giant virtual storage device
b) No need for RAID cards or software

4) No journaling
a) Not needed, and would reduce performance

The optimization that benefits SSDs is the lack of hot-spots.


Hot damn!
By amanojaku on 6/4/2008 2:16:57 PM , Rating: 2
If Sun's recent server line (SPARC and x86) is any indication the SSDs will be some serious performers with low power consumption. They'll also cost more than any of us can afford, but what decent SSD doesn't?




RE: Hot damn!
By DeepBlue1975 on 6/4/2008 3:00:37 PM , Rating: 1
Just be patient.
If corporate users jump on the SSD bandwagon, prices will go down for the desktop users.
Let the deep pocket ones be the main players and guinea pigs in this game, for us it means only benefits on the long run.

Kinda reminds me of what happened in the era where high performance SCSI drives were nowere near striking distance (or the price) for the desktop units: performance and yet space were vastly better on SCSI serverland than on IDE desktop town, which were like leftovers from the SCSI market. IDE drives kept getting better thanks to borrowing most of the bleeding edge tech used on the scsi units by the time. Now they both evolve separately: desktop market looking for higher data densities, and server market focusing on reliability and performance (even then by the time being, in many business environemnts SATA drives are replacing scsi drives because of a much better cost/benefit ratio than what ATA drives could provide 10 years ago)


RE: Hot damn!
By benx009 on 6/5/2008 4:33:56 PM , Rating: 2
It all comes down to time people, time.... Just give SSDs a few years, they'll come down like everything else... we shouldn't let ourselves be scared away from the new technology just b/c prices are the way they are now.


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