Sun Storage 7410

I mentioned earlier that Sun seems to be offering the same old SAN as EMC. This is the case for their 6580 but not for their 7410. I mentioned two problems from the EMC and below is how Sun addresses them.

• LUN Tetris: The Sun Storage 7410 stripes data across all SATA drives using ZFS to serve blocks in the case of iSCSI or files in the case of NFS. This similar to how NetApp uses WAFL. If you configure ZFS-NSP (no single point of failure) with a minimum of two drawers of disk, then redundant copies are written so you can loose more drives (an entire shelf?).
• SP Bottle Neck: Sun has the same problem here. One smart SP and several disk only drawers. However, you can max a 7410 to 288T.

Other 7410 features:

• Contains Solid State Flash drives which ZFS manages to improve performance in areas that need it which is similar to Compellent's automated tiered storage.
• Does not offer fiber channel access so the only way to read blocks from it is iSCSI.
• All extra features (snapshots, clones, etc) are included without separate licenses (unlike NetApp)
• Allows admin to SSH into Solaris based SPs for management OR use a Web Client (Ajax).
• A virtual box simulator let's you try out the management system.