Sun Open Storage

Abstract

Demands for data storage continue to increase, and enterprises are looking for ways to address this challenge

while keeping costs down. Instead of buying and then maintaining more and more storage devices, enterprises

now have another option: open storage. With open storage, businesses can leverage industry-standard

components and open-source software to build highly scalable, reliable, and flexible storage systems. And

now, Sun Open Storage provides a flexible option that can significantly lower costs, provide high performance,

simplify storage management, and provide access to the latest innovative capabilities.

SUN OPEN STORAGE:A LOWER-COST, HIGHER- PERFORMANCE ALTERNATIVE FOR THE ENTERPRISEOpen StorageWhite PaperMay 2009

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary ........................................................................................1

Storage Challenges in a Data-Intensive World ...................................................1

Open Storage in the Enterprise .......................................................................2

Open Source Delivers Software Building Blocks for Open Storage ........................ 3

Solaris ZFS™ Software .......................................................................................... 3

OpenSolaris COMSTAR ......................................................................................... 4

Solaris DTrace ..................................................................................................... 4

Solaris Fault Management Architecture ................................................................ 4

Extending the Value of Open Storage to Hardware Components.......................... 5

Complete, Enterprise-Ready Storage Solutions: Hardware Innovation That Fully Leverages Open Source ..................................................................................6

Sun Fire™ X4540 Storage Server: Tapping the Power of ZFS ................................. 8

How to Get Started with Sun Open Storage ......................................................9

Sun Open Storage Customer Success Story ........................................................9

Wikimedia Foundation Ensures Data Integrity for Ever-Expanding Online Resources 9

Sun Microsystems, Inc.1 Sun Open Storage

1 Source: IDC White Paper sponsored by EMC, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, March 2008

.

Executive SummaryThe amount of data that enterprises need to store, manage, and protect is increasing

exponentially. Enterprises traditionally address increasing storage needs by

purchasing more storage devices from proprietary vendors. However, these closed

systems have a number of disadvantages, including:

• High cost. In a proprietary environment, all disk drives, controllers, and software

typically have to come from the same vendor and are sold at premium prices.

The hardware often severely lags in capability behind industry-standard systems

components at similar price levels. And while the hardware may not seem

expensive, the cumulative cost associated with required and proprietary software

makes such a storage system much more costly.

• Lack of flexibility. Enterprises cannot add or modify software to suit their specific

needs or adapt and expand a storage system to meet growing data demands.

Today, enterprises have another option: open storage, which some industry analysts

estimate will make up almost 12% of the storage market by 2011. Using industry-

standard components and open-source software, open storage enables enterprises

to build highly scalable, reliable, and flexible storage systems to fit their growing

demands—all at a fraction of the cost of traditional, proprietary storage.

Responding to this market need, Sun Open Storage brings together leading open-

source software and industry-standard, proven servers to provide enterprises with a

real alternative. Enterprises that leverage Sun Open Storage can enjoy:

• Lower costs. With open-source software and industry-standard systems, Sun

Open Storage delivers enterprise reliability and scalability at one-tenth the cost of

closed, proprietary storage systems.

• A high degree of flexibility. With Sun Open Storage, enterprises are not locked in

to a single vendor; they can use the components that fit their needs and add new

capabilities—from Sun or third parties—without paying a premium or annuity for

proprietary products.

• High performance, simplified management. Sun Open Storage leverages

sophisticated tools for optimizing performance and dramatically reducing the

complexity of storage management.

• Innovation. With a large community of developers focused on creating new

capabilities that meet enterprises’ storage needs, Sun Open Storage can quickly

bring the best features to market.

Storage Challenges in a Data-Intensive WorldWith more and more users sharing content and collaborating, communicating, and

conducting business across the globe, enterprises today must ensure that their

storage infrastructure is flexible and scalable enough to handle these rapidly

growing demands. In 2008, IDC1 reported that the amount of new digital information


created, captured, or replicated in 2007 was 281 exabytes and is expected to grow

to 1773 exabytes by 2011. (An exabyte is equal to 1 quintillion bytes.) Approximately

70% of this data will be created by individuals or non-enterprises, but enterprises

and organizations will be responsible for storing, securing, and protecting 85% of

this new digital data.

When faced with increasing storage needs, the default strategy for many years

has been for enterprises to simply buy more storage devices. However, almost all

modern disk arrays and storage systems available from traditional storage vendors

are closed, proprietary systems; their customers are locked into buying disk drives,

controllers, and proprietary software features from only them—typically at premium

prices. Additionally, their customers cannot add their own drives or add or modify

software beyond what management configuration tools allow.

The rapid growth of new digital data, the management challenges that accompany

this growth, and the increasing costs of storage management point to the need for a

radically different storage pricing structure, as well as for new storage architectures

that offer more flexibility.

With the continuing growth of open-source software, community development, and

industry-standard hardware, open-storage architectures have become a viable

alternative for enterprises.

Open Storage in the Enterprise Open storage uses open-source software and industry-standard system components

to build highly scalable, reliable, and affordable enterprise storage systems, leverag-

ing the rapid innovation and flexibility of open communities and architectures.

Enterprises using open storage solutions can quickly benefit from the new

capabilities developed in a growing community of open-source software developers

rather than depend upon a proprietary vendor’s business goals or R&D budget.

They gain more freedom to expand their storage solutions in cost-effective ways.

For example, enterprises undertaking Web 2.0 initiatives need a high degree

of flexibility. Web 2.0 applications are dynamic, and they depend on open stan-

dards and open-source software to reduce costs and give developers the ability

to differentiate by adding their own custom software. Open storage meets these

requirements better than any other storage infrastructure or architecture avail-

able. Google and Amazon could not exist in their current forms if they hadn’t built

their own storage infrastructures based on open storage principles, rather than

traditional, proprietary storage architectures.

On the hardware side, there are a number of technical advantages to building

storage devices out of industry-standard system components and servers. One of


the performance bottlenecks in a data center has been the network; by using open

storage, applications can be brought closer to the data by running them on the

same system dedicated to storage functions. Industry-standard servers also provide

more processing capability and more cache memory than is available in a traditional

modular storage array. And finally, an open-storage architecture allows enterprises

to easily add CPUs, cache, and I/O connectivity, providing multi-dimensional

scalability.

By heavily investing in the development of the most comprehensive set of open-

storage products, solutions, and services, Sun offers enterprises proven, scalable

technology with a level of flexibility and cost-effectiveness not found in proprietary

systems.

Open Source Delivers Software Building Blocks for Open StorageSun Open Storage offers enterprises the ability to build the storage infrastructure

that suits their needs using Sun’s proven, open-source software and industry-

standard hardware components (either from Sun or certified hardware from third

parties).

The foundation of Sun Open Storage is the OpenSolaris™ Operating System, one of

the most robust, reliable, and innovative OS’s available. The OpenSolaris storage

community, launched in 2007 when Sun donated a vast amount of storage technol-

ogy to the OpenSolaris project, is now the world’s leading centralized open-source

storage community. Sun plays an active role in the OpenSolaris storage community

by contributing code and working with open-source developers around the world to

design or enhance storage capabilities.

Storage industry leaders such as Hitachi Data Systems, QLogic, Emulex, and Brocade

have also contributed their software to the OpenSolaris community, and companies

across the IT landscape are using OpenSolaris technology in their storage product

offerings. Sun remains active in the community, providing expert support and service

to Sun Open Storage users, and Sun engineers continue to build upon the work of

the open-source community to deliver additional features and capabilities that

businesses need.

OpenSolaris features that are central to the Sun Open Storage solution are:

Solaris ZFS™ SoftwareSolaris ZFS™ technology offers a dramatic advancement in data management with

a virtual storage pool design, integrated volume manager, and data services that

provide an innovative approach to data integrity.


1 The $2 million claim is based upon Sun consolidation customers’ average savings over an 18-24 month period. Cus-tomers calculated savings based on energy, space, licensing, services contract costs, increased utilization and reduction of management of systems.

Sun Open Storage:

Cost-Saving Opportunities

for the Enterprise

Sun Open Storage delivers breakthrough

economics, saving enterprises up to 90%

over closed, proprietary storage.

• Licensing fees. OpenSolaris and related

data services software, such as snapshot

and remote replication, are free to use

without licensing fees. On the other

hand, technologies from competitors like

EMC or NetApp carry expensive license

fees, often carrying list prices in the tens

of thousands of dollars, significantly

increasing the initial cost of their

solutions.

• Acquisition cost. Proprietary disks such

as the EMC CLARiiON are marked up 5x

compared to market-priced disks. Enter-

prises can save up to 90% with a Sun Fire

x4500 ($1.29/GB) vs. comparable disks in

EMC Symmetrix with SATA ($11.78/GB) or

EMC CLARiiON tier 3 SATA ($3.44/GB) for

a 62% savings. (Note: this is only

acquisition cost.)

• Investment protection. With open

source, there is no cost to acquire and

no vendor lock-in. Because enterprises

pay at the point of value (hardware, war-

ranty, and services), this model protects

investments and turns software into

operational costs.

• Virtualization. With Sun Open Storage,

enterprises can apply server virtualiza-

tion techniques to storage infrastructure,

allowing flexibility and choice for where

they run data services and saving energy,

space, and expense while increasing

utilization rates. Sun’s virtualization

solutions combine energy-efficient Sun

servers, storage, software, and profes-

sional services which have been proven

to reduce IT costs by as much as $2M/

year1, achieve 99.99% availability, and

improve system utilization to as high as

85%.

(Continued on Page 5)

ZFS software allows for more efficient use of storage devices and enables accelerated

performance of Web applications without changes to the application. Physical

storage can be added to or removed from storage pools dynamically without inter-

rupting services, providing new levels of flexibility, availability, and performance.

In terms of scalability, ZFS software is a 128-bit file system that provides 16 billion,

billion times the capacity of 32- or even 64-bit file systems. It supports more file

systems, snapshots, and files in a file system than can possibly be created in the

foreseeable future.

ZFS software also provides the data services needed to protect data far beyond what

exists today in traditional storage systems. It saves enterprises money by maintain-

ing data redundancy on commodity hardware through the delivery of basic mirror-

ing, compression, and integrated volume management. It supports new hybrid disk-

storage devices that include Flash technology for greater performance. And it also

combines proven, cutting-edge technologies to ensure data integrity; while most file

systems do nothing to check the integrity of data on the disks, ZFS software checks

the data continuously to guard against silent corruption.

Vendors of closed, proprietary storage appliances typically charge customers extra

software licensing fees for data management services like administration, replica-

tion, and volume management. Because ZFS software is part of the OpenSolaris OS,

those additional costs, complexities, and unnecessary layers are eliminated.

OpenSolaris COMSTARWith OpenSolaris COMSTAR (Common Multiprotocol SCSI TARget), an enterprise IT

department can turn any standard server into a storage device, delivering significant

cost savings. COMSTAR is a software framework that offers the functionality of a

SCSI target device that can be accessed over the network, essentially allowing an

enterprise to create a storage array from standard computing server and storage

components.

Solaris DTraceSolaris DTrace is a comprehensive, advanced tracing tool for troubleshooting

systemic problems in real time. With DTrace, administrators, integrators, and

developers can tune applications for performance and troubleshoot production

systems—all without requiring the production system to be taken offline and

without impacting performance.

Solaris Fault Management ArchitectureAs storage data grows, there is an increasing chance of media and subsequent

hardware failures. The OpenSolaris community is continuing the development and

refinement of the Solaris 10 Fault Management Architecture (FMA) by adding disk


2 To find out more, see http://www.sun.com/customers/storage/knowledgebase.xml

(Continued from Page 4)

• Eco Efficiency. Sun offers systems,

storage, software, and services that

yield tremendous savings in terms of

energy, materials, space, and labor. For

example, an OpenSolaris hybrid stor-

age pool (HSP) running on a four-way

quad-core Intel® Xeon® platform with

five 400GB 5400 RPM drives, one 80GB

read-optimized flash drive, and one 32GB

write-optimized flash drive, used 4.9x

less power than an equivalent server

platform running seven 146GB 10,000

RPM SAS drives. The HSP also delivered

a 3.2x improvement in read IOPS and an

11% improvement in write IOPS. (Perfor-

mance numbers will vary depending on

the specific workload.)

• Assessment Services. Sun’s storage

experts can help architect cost-effective

storage infrastructures tailored to each

organizations’ specific needs. For exam-

ple, by utilizing Sun Storage Assessment

services, KnowledgeBase Marketing

reduced storage TCO by 40%, administra-

tion time by 50%, and transaction costs

by 86%.2

failure diagnosis, which includes quick identification of faulty drives and

preventative measures.

FMA provides automatic monitoring and diagnosis of I/O subsystems and hardware

faults and facilitates a simpler and more effective end-to-end experience for system

administrators. This is achieved by isolating and disabling faulty components and

then continuing the provision of service through a reconfiguration of redundant

paths to data—even before an administrator knows there is a problem.

Extending the Value of Open Storage to Hardware ComponentsSun Open Storage solutions leverage the influence of a community of passionate

open-source software developers as well as more than 25 years of Sun’s on-going

innovation in server, storage, and software technologies. With Sun Open Storage,

enterprises can freely mix, match, and maximize software and datacenter compo-

nents and even repurpose and reuse hardware simply by adding new software.

Because it’s not always economically feasible to swap out old systems in order to

upgrade performance or add capacity, Sun Open Storage solutions offer enterprises

virtually unlimited file system capacity (through the open-source ZFS software)

and can scale throughput well beyond that of traditional, proprietary storage

solutions—at a fraction of the cost.

By combining proven open-source software with industry-standard hardware, Sun

Open Storage enables enterprises to:

• Selectthesoftwareandhardwarecomponentsthatmeettheirneeds

• Reducetheirrelianceonhigh-pricedsystemsandsaveupto90%onstoragecost

• GainmassivescalabilitytoenablefastresponsetounpredictableWeb

data growth

• Simplifydeploymentandmanagement

• Improveservicelevelsthroughtuningandreal-timediagnosticsandworkload

analysis

• Quicklyreconfiguresystemstoindependentlyincreasecomputepower,storage

capacity, or performance

http://www.sun.com/customers/storage/knowledgebase.xml


Sun Open Storage solutions allow enterprises flexibility in designing their storage

infrastructures as well as cost savings compared to proprietary storage solutions.

Businesses can leverage the innovation available in Sun’s open-source software,

including advanced tools for optimizing performance and simplifying storage

management, use only the components that fit their needs, and add new capabili-

ties easily and without the high prices charged by proprietary vendors. And because

industry-standard hardware can adopt next-generation technologies faster—with

the additional benefit of fair market pricing through competition—enterprises can

realize consistently higher performance at a lower cost with open-storage systems

than with closed systems.

To accommodate different business and technical needs, Sun offers both industry-

standard open-storage components and, for enterprises that want a complete

solution out of the box, fully integrated and optimized storage appliances such as

the Sun™ Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems, which include one of the industry’s

most powerful, easy-to-use management software solutions.

Complete, Enterprise-Ready Storage Solutions: Hardware Innovation That Fully Leverages Open Source While some enterprises may want to build their own storage infrastructure using

Sun’s open-source software and industry-standard hardware, others want the cost-

effectiveness and flexibility of open-source technologies in a complete, enterprise-

ready storage offering. The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System offers a turnkey

storage solution specifically designed to leverage the powerful features of the Open-

Solaris OS, bringing the promise and benefits of open storage to the enterprise.

Sun Storage 7000 unified storage systems are powerful storage appliances that

utilize low-cost commodity disks, enabling enterprises to scale performance along

with capacity without expensive, high-speed disk drives. These appliances are the

only storage systems that also fully exploit Flash storage technology by taking

advantage of hybrid storage pools in Solaris ZFS software as well as a range of other

unique technologies in the OpenSolaris OS.

Unlike other storage solutions that charge for each additional storage feature, all

Sun Storage 7000 unified storage systems include comprehensive data services at

no extra cost, including snap/clone, restore, mirroring, RAID-5, RAID-6, replication,

active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, HTTP/FTP,

and WebDAV. The unique design of these systems also enables enterprises to benefit

from continuous innovation when new data services and features are available from

Sun through included automated updates.


Sun Storage 7000 unified storage systems provide:

• Simplified management. Sun Storage 7000 series products are fully integrated

appliances that can be installed and configured in less than five minutes in some

cases. The graphical user interface is extremely intuitive and simple to use and

administer.

• Breakthrough economics. By leveraging open-source software and open-standards

hardware components, the Sun Storage 7000 series achieves breakthrough

economics for enterprise customers in today’s turbulent economy with:

• Lower cost

• Lower power consumption

• No software licensing fees

• Faster innovation compared to proprietary systems

• DTrace Analytics. The industry’s only comprehensive and intuitive analytics

environment, DTrace Analytics provides all the tools administrators need to quickly

identify and diagnose system performance issues, perform capacity planning, and

debug live storage and networking problems before they become challenging for

the entire network. Available only with Sun Storage 7000 unified storage systems,

DTrace Analytics gives administrators the ability to easily drill down for in-depth

analysis of Web infrastructure storage subsystems. Built-in instrumentation

provides real-time visibility throughout the data path, making it much faster and

easier to pinpoint performance bottlenecks—even those that may not be related

to the storage system.

• Hybrid storage pools. Sun Storage 7000 series products are the only storage

systems with hybrid storage pools that combine DRAM, write-optimized solid-state

drives (SSDs), and read-optimized SSD with high-capacity, low-cost, enterprise-

class SATA drives. Hybrid storage pools use Solaris ZFS software to optimize and

manage them transparently as a single hierarchy. This new storage design uses the

low latency of SSDs to increase performance for both write- and read-oriented

applications, delivering superior performance and high capacity with lower cost

and energy consumption.

• Self-healing storage. The Sun Storage 7000 series includes Failure Management

Architecture (FMA), which provides the capability to detect and take faulty hard-

ware components offline in order to prevent system disruption. FMA combined

with ZFS data integrity facilities makes the Sun Storage 7000 the most

comprehensive self-healing unified storage system available.


SuN STORAGE 7000 EMC CELERRA NETAPP FAS

OPERATING SySTEM Open-source, enterprise-class OpenSolaris

Proprietary DART Proprietary Data ONTAP

DATA SERVICES SOFTWARE

No separate licensing fees

Additional license fee for most options

Additional license fee for most options

FLASH/SSD OPTIMIzED

Yes, through ZFS and hybrid storage pools

Yes: Flash as Tier 0 (no hybrid storage pool)

Not available

ANALyTICS Robust, real-time analytics through DTrace

Limited reporting through Celerra Manager

Limited reporting available

Sun Storage 7000 vs. Proprietary Systems

Sun Fire™ X4540 Storage Server: Tapping the Power of ZFSThe Sun Fire™ X4540 Storage Server is the first open-storage server that integrates

industry-standard server hardware and storage components in an open architecture

and leverages the open source-based Solaris ZFS software RAID, which maintains

data redundancy without the expense of a hardware RAID controller or NVRAM. The

Sun Fire X4540 server delivers the highest storage density and data throughput with

a built-in, high-performance compute engine at half the cost and up to 50% power

savings compared to traditional servers and storage arrays.

When compared to a typical storage controller, the Sun Fire X4540 server offers

significant cost savings and more power:

PROPRIETARy 2u STORAGE CONTROLLER 2u x64 SuN FIRE x4540 SERVER

1-2 CPU sockets 4 CPU sockets

2-4 CPU cores 16 CPU cores

4 GB DRAM 64-128 GB DRAM

1 GB NVRAM

4x1GB Ethernet 4x1GB Ethernet

4-6x PCI-X or PCIe 4-6x PCIe

Cost: $40,000 to $50,000 Cost: $12,000 to $24,000


The Sun Fire X4540 storage server is a great fit for applications that take advantage

of the close proximity of data to compute resources, such as HPC storage clusters

utilizing Lustre (an open-source file system available from Sun designed for high-

performance Linux compute clusters), high-performance data warehousing, video

streaming and video surveillance, and data backup on disk. A very versatile

storage system, the Sun Fire X4540 storage server fits seamlessly in file-based

storage architectures with NFS and CIFS, iSCSI storage systems, and FC-based SAN

storage environments.

How to Get Started with Sun Open Storage

1. If they haven’t already, ask your developers to download and experiment with

OpenSolaris through the storage community at opensolaris.org/os/community/

storage/. They can also join the community and help create new innovations in

storage software.

2. Try out Sun storage solutions free of charge through the Sun Try and Buy

program at sun.com/tryandbuy/.

For more information on Sun Open Storage, see sun.com/openstorage/.

Sun Open Storage Customer Success Story

Wikimedia Foundation Ensures Data Integrity for Ever-Expanding Online Resources Founded in 2001, the Wikimedia Foundation hosts a variety of wikis, including

Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and Wikimedia Commons—but by far it is best known for

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Among the 10 most visited Web sites in the

world, Wikipedia had nearly 250 million unique visitors in October 2008. Articles are

written and edited by more than 100,000 volunteer editors worldwide and in total,

the site hosts 11 million articles in 265 languages.

The Web site receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second,

depending on the time of day. Wikimedia needed to update its infrastructure to

handle this huge volume of traffic and ensure that its systems were reliable, highly

available, and easily scalable. It also wanted to expand its upload file limit from 20

MB to 100 MB to accommodate rich media (audio and video) content—but before it

could do that, Wikimedia needed to expand its storage capacity.

The foundation acquired Sun Fire X4150, Sun Fire X4240, and Sun Fire X4540 servers

running the Solaris 10 Operating System and MySQL™ open-source database soft-

ware. The Sun Fire 4540 storage server provides low-cost, high-density storage and

eight-way processing in a single enclosure. “We looked at other vendors, but they

couldn’t get up to the scale we wanted,” says Brion Vibber, chief technology officer

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/

http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/

http://www.sun.com/openstorage


at the Wikimedia Foundation. “They didn’t offer support like ZFS backups, snapshot-

ting and self-healing; or they were just incredibly expensive SAN systems that were

totally proprietary.”

Data integrity was one of the Wikimedia Foundation’s primary concerns. On their

Linux servers, data was backed up to direct-attached RAID arrays. “If a disk failed, we

could replace it, but if a whole machine died, we were out of luck. We needed a way

to keep a standby disk active,” says Vibber. On the Sun Fire X4540 servers, which are

configured in pairs, Wikimedia uses Solaris ZFS replication to ensure data integrity.

“With ZFS, we’re able to replicate in real time and store multiple backup snapshots

on each server,” Vibber says. “It’s a big improvement because we no longer worry

about losing all of our work if a system fails.”

It was also very difficult for Wikimedia to expand storage with the configuration

it had—but Sun’s Open Storage approach changed that, too. “When we needed

more storage, we would add another Linux box with a big RAID array, and then copy

directories around and split up everything manually,” says Vibber. “Now with ZFS,

we can add disks and extend the ZFS pool, and we’re done—the space is instantly

available. It doesn’t require us to replace everything if we need to expand, and we’re

very happy about that.”

Sun Microsystems, Inc. 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA Phone 1-650-960-1300 or 1-800-555-9SUN (9786) Web sun.com

Sun Microsystems, Inc.Sun Open Storage

© 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, OpenSolaris, Solaris, ZFS, Sun Fire, and MySQL are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Printed in USA 05/09 #XXXXX

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