For example, he said, Sun's new NAS 5320 leverages its AMD Opteron-based Galaxy server platform, and the upcoming Honeycomb security appliance and Thumper high-performance file server are based on technologies from Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a server technology firm founded by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of Sun’s co-founders.
informationweek.com
I thought Honeycomb was to be the next gen. storage. Security appliance? Here is another take on this:
Sun also previewed Projects Honeycomb and Thumper. Honeycomb is Sun’s content-addressable storage array, consisting of processors that can be scaled horizontally to create a low-cost clustered architecture that supports self-healing and load-balancing. Honeycomb supports the Network File System and is expected to support Microsoft’s Common Internet File System soon, sources say.
Project Thumper, an Opteron server with lots of storage capacity, will let customers store and archive data that is not critical to business.
Both Honeycomb and Thumper are in beta tests. Thumper is expected to ship this month.
computerworld.co.nz
A little more detail here:
Sun talks layered honeycomb, thumper
4th May 2006
By Staff Writer
Sun Microsystems Inc's late-running Honeycomb disk archive will feature a very different architecture from other CAS disk archives, the company is promising.
AdvertisementHoneycomb will host third-party code, Sun said during its quarterly Network Computing sales pitch in Washington, DC, where it also gave a very broad outline of a coming disk array code-named Thumper.
Honeycomb is Sun's answer to EMC Corp's Centera or Hewlett-Packard Co's RISS disk archives, and was originally slated to ship late last year. Now Sun says that Honeycomb is already on early-access release, and will probably ship around the end of the summer.
That might have left a gap in Sun's product portfolio, but since its acquisition of Storage Technology Corp last year, Sun has been able to offer the StorageTek-originated IntelliStore CAS box.
Like the Centera and the RISS, Honeycomb involves multiple controllers or storage nodes, and an object-oriented or content-addressed file system that will use digital fingerprints or hashes to address data objects.
Also like those boxes, it will allow third-party applications to create and store meta-data inside the CAS array. But unlike its rivals, Honeycomb will be able to host code that has been written specially for it, or code that has been split out from existing content management or other applications by third-party developers.
This code will handle "custom data services," such as encryption, or the extraction of meta-data from data at the point of ingestion into an array. This multi-tier processing of different application or data service tasks will result in better application performance, reliability and scalability, according to Sun.
It will exploit the processing power of the clustered and load-balanced controllers within the Honeycomb, and it will also simplify certain transactions. Rather than passing volumes of meta-data back up to an application server, for example when handling a search query, Honeycomb will run the query itself locally. It will execute a code object called a "disklet" - the disk-array hosted equivalent of a server- or client-hosted applet - and then return only the results of the search to the application server.
Honeycomb will run Java code initially, and support for other languages likely to follow, the company said. "This isn't just an API it's a full programming environment," said Sun's SVP and Strategic Insight Officer Larry Singer. "So it's got the characteristics of a server and a storage device in one box," he said. But it will also feature simple API access, and NFS and CIFS access to data.
The code-name Thumper has been bouncing around in the public domain for a little while, with little detail attached to it. Sun did not change that situation much at its conference, but did say that Thumper will be a second-tier, ATA-powered array, tailored for specific applications such as video file serving.
"If I catch anybody running an Oracle database on it, I'm got to go round in person and shoot them," said Paul Giroux, Sun vice president. Thumper will feature the same "Application Aware Programmable Storage" architecture as Honeycomb.
Sun broke out details of its latest 5320 NAS device, which can be bought either as a vanilla file server, or can be loaded with compliance software. Powered by the latest AMD Opteron processors, the 5320 is 55% faster that its predecessor the 5310, with a SPECFS of 27,700 IOPS and a maximum rated capacity of 179TB.
According to Sun, the 5320 is around 10% faster in SPECFS IOPS than NetApp's rival 3050 filer. Computer Business Review was not able to contact NetApp for a comment on this claim.
cbronline.com
Joe |
