Sun's StorageTek "Cheap" Line

Sun's line of storage products that aimed at the corporate environment received a new additional family member that the manufacturing company sees as the solution to the needs of small businesses and back offices. The new virtual tape library box can be squeezed into tight spaces and does not need the room of other dedicated storage solutions for corporate and enterprise use.

According to the news site TheRegister, the new StorageTek VTL-Value box uses much of the same parts, both hardware and software, of its bigger counterparts, but is the first storage solution to be built around the Sun Fire X4500 server (codenamed Thumper). In order to keep production costs at a very low level (for a corporate storage system, that is) Sun decided to use the "one size fits all" policy and design the box with an unformatted storage capacity of 24TB, using 48 hard disk drives, each with 500GB of space and SATA interface, in a 4U design. The processing power is delivered by two AMD Opteron 2.6GHz dual-core processors, while the box comes with the Solaris operating system preinstalled. For connectivity to the Internet or another network, Sun included four 2Gb Fibre channel ports and 4Gb Eternet ports that can be used for replicating data on a network too.

The hard disk drives come with the 128-ZFS file system and they are configured for a RAID Z protection and as no RAID 6+1 solution is used there is not need for volume management software. According to Sun's storage exec Dan Albright, this setup based on the torageTek VTL-Value can reduce the energy bill with as much as 50 percent. The first iteration of the server will include only a limited number of software solutions like Symantec NetBackUp, Legato NetWorker, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and CA BrightStore, while all future releases will see the addition of software packages like BakBone NetVault, SyncSort Backup Express, Commvault Galaxy, Symantec Back-up Exec, Atempo Time Navigator and HPOpenView Storage Data Protector.

As Sun already has plans to upgrade the 500GB hard disk drives to 750GB ones, the StorageTek VTL-Value will receive a significant boost of its storage capacity. Another improvement will be the use of 4Gb channel speeds for networking, even if that kind of performance is not usually needed in that server's class. A typical StrorageTek server, configured and deployed with two virtual libraries, two host servers, five virtual tape drives and the VTL console, comes at $84,995.

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