Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System product line enhancements

The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System product line enhancements include built-in inline data deduplication that can be combined with inline data compression, 4 and 8 Gbps fibre channel protocol support, multiple storage pools, and 1 and 2 TB SAS disk drives.

These features help reduce the costs of storing, consolidating and managing data with increased storage efficiency, expand the use of the product line into fibre channel storage area networks (SANs) and improve overall capacity and availability.

The company is claimed to be the first to bring advanced DTrace analytics to fibre channel SANs. Storage analytics enable storage administrators to quickly locate and manage SAN workload hot spots and bottlenecks, understand how configuration and application changes affect the storage system and provision Flash storage capabilities without guesswork.

The product line is supported with the company’s Solaris, Enterprise Linux, VM, Database 11g, Applications, Fusion Middleware and Sun System software products, as well as third-party products.

The product line provides integrated deduplication and compression. The deduplication and compression work in real time, requiring no separate post-processing tasks.

The support for multiple storage pools enables greater optimisation of storage for dynamic environments with multiple applications and user environments, a key requirement for cloud computing.

With the addition of fibre channel protocol support, users can use the advanced analytics and Flash-accelerated performance in fibre channel SAN environments.

The line is claimed to have one of the widest coverage of file and block access protocols for a unified storage system. Fibre channel-connected unified storage is suitable for consolidated private clouds that need to serve a variety of application protocols and is a cost-effective upgrade for existing bulk storage/consolidation environments that use fibre channel to connect.

The 1 and 2 TB SAS drives double capacity over previous systems, use a faster disk interconnect to move data at up to 6 Gbps, and offer improvements for added high availability. Unlike other products with file systems limited to 16 TB, the product line simplifies storage deployment and management by enabling its maximum capacity of 576 TB to be accessed as a single file system, or thousands of individual file systems and LUNs.