As announced early, Sun unveiled a new storage platform with the latest improvements in both hardware and software.

Here's a few details :

The system is based on ZFS filesystem with the latest improvements (like ZFS transfers from the last version of solaris u6 and OpenSolaris). This new project fishworks is an evolution of Sun's Thumper storage servers. Hardware is a mix of:

- NAND Flash and DRAM

- SSD (for the cache, L2ARC and the ZFS Intent Log - ZIL)

- hard disks drives

The products are available in three configurations and can be clustered for high availability :

- 7110 : Up to 2 TB in a 2U form factor

- 7210 : Up to 44 TB in a 4U form factor

- 7410 : Up to 500 TB with tray/shelves

 

From the client side, it acts like a classic NFS, CIFS, iSCSI target, HTTP, WebDAV, FTP and NDMP (no FC target) with a good looking GUI and a CLI access, dtrace probes are involved for monitoring and statistics gathering.

 

I didn't test this product but we all have a good knowledge the technologies behind, this Storage 7000 platform is a great alternative to Netapp filers, Nexenta system, Hitachi AMS platform, and the others... it would be great to have a SFS97 bench posted at spec.org to help compare.

 

Some links :

Sun Storage 7000 official site

Announcement on Jonathan Schwartz's blog

Whitepaper on Sun.com (login/registration required)

Fishworks Hardware Topology

Performance measurement : methodology and some results

Logzilla and Readzilla

A VMWare image with a Fishworks simulator is also available.

EDIT: The simulator images didn't work on VirtualBox ! Some screenshots at c0t0d0s0.eu