Sun Sets Out 2008 Storage Roadmap

Sun, which announced plans for Flash-based SSDs earlier this week, is planning a slew of new products for the second half of this year, including a high-speed 40-Gbit/s InfiniBand switch, storage blades, and a raft of server/storage combos.

We have a huge amount of action,” said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun’s systems division, during a media and analyst event in Boston earlier this week. “There’s a huge amount of storage products kind of outside the traditional crossbar array.”

These will include the successor to the 3,456-port ‘Magnum’ device launched by Sun last year, which the vendor has been touting as the ‘world’s largest InfiniBand switch’.

Sun’s Fowler explained that Magnum is currently limited to 20-Gbit/s per port, although the vendor is now looking to double this throughput.

“We’re in the process of engineering the 40-Gigabit version, the next generation of Magnum,” he said, adding that the souped-up InfiniBand switch will be available in the second half of 2008.This move is driven, at least in part, by the vendor’s plans to add Flash-based SSDs to its storage and server product line. The high performance drives will require much faster interconnects, according to Fowler.

”Storage is going to suddenly become much faster, and the network that you use to connect the server to the storage is going to suddenly become one of the contention points,” he said. “One of the reasons we have been investing in very high performance networking is because of Flash SSD storage.”

The vendor is also planning to extend its strategy of offering server/storage combos, which started with the launch of the X4500 ‘Thumper’ device in 2006.

”You will see us incorporating storage in a modular way into our blade servers,” explained Fowler. “Having integrated storage capabilities allows us to build different kinds of storage servers out of blade servers.”

Other products in the pipeline include a family of low-cost arrays running the ZFS file system that connect to conventional servers. “[This is] so that you can connect a wide range of arrays to create cascading large-scale storage devices even without requiring RAID controllers,” he says.Sun is also preparing to re-brand its X4150, X4450, and X4440 servers as storage offerings by packing them full of SSDs.

”It seems like a simple idea, but by making a lot of disk slots available in servers, you can use them in a great variety of ways,” explains Fowler. “When we designed those, what we had in mind as a server team, [was that they] were a building block for either storage devices or servers, depending on how you populated the slots.”

The exec added that all of these products will be available sometime within the next six months.

Sun’s sudden frenzy of product launches comes at a critical time for the company, which faces stiff competition from the likes of EMC, IBM, and NetApp, not to mention an increasingly difficult economic climate.

Last month, for example, Sun confirmed that its Q3 storage sales took a hit from the current IT spending slowdown.Sun also announced 1,500 job cuts last month, less than a year after the vendor merged its Storage Division with its Systems Group.

”So far, so good,” is Fowler’s take on the merger of Sun’s Storage and Systems businesses, although the exec admits that it has taken time to combine the two operations. “Like you can imagine, from an R&D standpoint, it takes a while to develop new products and new technologies. You are going to see new products that are the by-products of putting the two groups together start to appear in the fall.”

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