Coolest new storage product of the year: Sun's X4500

Coolest storage product of the year may be Sun's new X4500. Packing 24 TB of storage and 2 dual-core 64-bit Opterons into a 4U box, it is the first system anywhere to leverage the very cool open-source ZFS (see StorageMojo's overview ZFS: Threat Or Menace?). True end-to-end data integrity. RAID-Z performance. Cheap snapshots. 128-bit addressing. All backed up by the most brutal test suite I've ever seen.

ZFS: The First Internet-Scale File and Storage System
Google uses the Google File System (GFS) (see StorageMojo's much Digg'd Google File System Eval). GFS enables Google's incredible scale. Yet GFS isn't a commercial product and isn't built for IT work. But Sun's ZFS is. The best data protection of any production storage plus high performance. The X4500 is ready for serious enterprise use. And at less than $2 per GB (after normal discounts), it should be sending chills down the backs of vendors whose bloatware arrays cost 5-10x per Terabyte.

Don't Expect To Hear About This From Sun
To recap, the X4500 is super-available, fast and low-cost. So Sun has no idea how to market it, especially since they have to keep selling all that STK and HDS gear. Sun CEO Schwartz admitted in his blog: "We're still figuring out what to call the product." There's probably a turf war between Sun's systems and storage groups that for the product's sake I hope the systems group wins.

Sun Doesn't Know What They've Got
Thanks to ZFS the X4500 has enterprise-class data integrity combined with the management simplicity of a storage appliance. Yet the X4500 white paper spends only 350 words on ZFS - and misses the key benefits of availability and performance. Oops.

This Is A First
Google has demonstrated that building availability around commodity hardware rather than into expensive point products works. The X4500 is the first commercial instantiation of Google's insight. Congrats to all the folks at Sun who put this together.