Sun Unveils Thumper Data Storage 285
zdzichu writes "At today's press conference, Sun Microsystems is showing off a few new systems. One of them is the Sun Fire x4500, known previously under the 'Thumper' codename. It's a compact dual Opteron rack server, 4U high, packed with 48 SATA-II drives. Yes, when standard for 4U server is four to eight hard disks, Thumper delivers forty-eight HDDs with 24 TB of raw storage. And it will double within the year, when 1TB drives will be sold. More information is also available at Jonathan Schwartz's blog."
I want one! (Score:3, Interesting)
cooling (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$42,000 (Score:2, Interesting)
If I didn't, only a fool would buy the more expensive version. Just go in for the cheap array, and purchase 750GB drives yourself, re-sell the original 48x250GB ones, and you'll save yourself a rather large sum of money.
Re::O (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ah, yes...a machine labelled "Sun"... appropria (Score:3, Interesting)
24TB for $70k (Sun) or 24TB for $16k (generic) (Score:3, Interesting)
But, unfortunately, they're not quite as cheap as I had thought. (Friend on the inside thought Sun was going to price them at $1.25 per GB, not $2 per GB)
Instead, we've been using these. Very good cooling:
http://www.rackmountpro.com/productpage.php?prodi
32 SATA-II 750g drives = 24TB, same as the Sun X4500, but for only $16,000 for the entire system (chassis, mobo, ram, drives) instead of $70,000 for the Sun Thumper. Huge difference especially if you're ordering many of them.
Re:Pfft... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:24TB for $70k (Sun) or 24TB for $16k (generic) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Holy SHIT! (Score:3, Interesting)
Meanwhile, the x4600 (8 dual core Opteron system) does apparently use 2 12cm fans.
With all those disks, I suppose it might not make much difference, but I would have rather seen them using 12cm fans on the x4500 as well.
Re:Holy SHIT! (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad idea from a storage management point of view (Score:4, Interesting)
If you are interested in storage consolidation and increasing utilization while reducing storage islands. This isn't for you.
With 48disks, you'll want protection... all implemented in software raid. So you do raid-5, probably create raid groups of 12 disks? 8 disks? as the number of disks in the raid group goes down, the amount of disk you waste on parity, and the amount of CPU cycles done on calculating parity goes up.
As the industry moves to FC boot and iSCSI boot to alleviate the need to stock disk drives from 15 different vendors, this is an interesting idea for those who don't want to have a raid array. But in most shops, huge internal storage is sooooo '90s.
How do you replicate this beast? VeritasVolume Replicator. Serverless backup? Nope.
Re:Beware of the 2.5" disk drives (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I want one! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Indeed, Sun's list prices are way too high (Score:3, Interesting)
The disks would go in the chassis (see my itemized list). You may not know it but Sun is not the 1st company to use a chassis with vertical bays. Here is one example [datadirectnet.com] among many. The price would be more likely around 2 or 3 grands by the way, instead of 1 grand. But anyway this doesn't change the fact that this Sun box is way overpriced, even with a good 40% discount.
Regarding the mobo, just pick one with two AMD 8131 or 8132 PCI-X bridges. This will give you 4 independent PCI-X busses. The two PCI-X bridges would have to be on 2 different HT links in order to not dangerously approach the theoretical one-way data throughput limit of 3.2 GB/s of one 1600 MT/s 16 bits HT link. The two PCI-X bridges could be either connected to different CPUs or to the same CPU because the Opteron XBAR _can_ easily handle the ~3 GB/s you speak about, it has been designed to support 19.2 GB/s of HT traffic and even more with the recent upgrade to 2000 MT/s ccHT links. Now with the 4 independent PCI-X busses, you could put 4 SATA HBAs on the 1st and 2nd busses, and 2 HBAs on the 3rd and 4th busses. This way the first 2 busses will run at 100 MHz and the 2 others will run at 133 MHz, giving a practical throughput of 3.4 GB/s (2 * (100 MHz * 64 bits / 8) + 2 * (133 MHz * 64 bits / 8), and assuming a 90% efficiency as found on most PCI/PCI-X busses), this is enough to handle the 3 GB/s you are speaking about. There are plenty of single AMD 8131 mobo on the market right now starting at $250. I am sure you can find one with two AMD 813x for $500 max.
Now when I think about it you could even use SATA port multipliers in order to reduce the number of HBAs, allowing all busses to run at 133 MHz. I am aware of 12-port and 24-port SATA HBAs (Areca comes to mind) but those are outrageously expensive and are not necessary to handle all that throughput. My experience and those of my friends playing with high-end enterprise gear prove that _very_ simple and inexpensive PCI-X SATA chips such as the SII3124 or Marvell 88SXxxxx are way sufficient to handle the max combined read throughput of any number of disks attached to their SATA ports. The reason being that the designers of such chips have come up with a simple and performant hardware interface optimized to reduce the CPU load. I know for a fact that the SII3124 design is somewhat close to the AHCI spec which is the best example of a performant SATA hw interface.
So I _do_ believe that it is possible to build a $13-14k server with 48 SATA disks in 4U offering ~3 GB/s of raw read throughput. I don't understand why so many people refuse to believe that, especially since other posters in this thread have pointed out that some vendors are already selling similarly priced servers !