It's a more solid-state Sun, embedding flash memory in servers

This week, Sun announced solid-state disk technology as an option for its x64 and chip multi-threaded (CMT) rack and blade servers, along with free trial and pricing discount offers. In addition, it rolled out the Sun Flash Analyzer, a new software tool for helping customers leverage SSD-based servers to raise application performance.

The company's overall flash effort is particularly ambitious and far reaching, even though Sun isn't the first vendor to offer SSD flash as a server option, according to some analysts. IBM, for example, beat Sun out the door with SSD-enabled servers way back in 2007, noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, in an interview with Betanews.

Yet Sun's "end-to-end" SSD initiative, first unveiled early last year, already includes Solaris ZFS, a file system "optimized" for SSDs, along with SSD storage disk arrays, an area where vendors such as EMC, Dell, and smaller specialists Pillar Data Systems and Fusion are now playing, too. Sun launched its first SSD storage arrays -- the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems with Integrated Flash -- in November of 2008.

"SSDs aren't for everyone, though," according to King. SSDs remain a lot pricier than traditional hard disk drives, so that use of the alternative drives makes the most financial sense among databases and other applications that can really benefit from SSDs' high throughput with faster response times.

The new Sun Flash Analyzer -- available as a download for Solaris 10, Windows, and Linux OS -- is designed to identify applications in this category and also to make suggestions about methods of increasing system performance.

To help drive down costs of SSD deployment, SSDs are often combined with other storage technologies in hybrid configurations, King observed. For instance, Sun's ZFS for the Solaris OS supports "hybrid storage pools" of SSDs, HDDs, and DRAM.

Sun is also touting its SSD-enabled servers as reducing power consumption by 38% over HDDs.

Despite the grim economy, Sun's timing with the server announcement seems propitious. While SSDs still don't come cheap, pricing on the drives has dropped eightfold over the past year, King contended.

Sun's SSD servers start at $3,240 for a Sun Fire X6560 blade system. It's also selling its SSD flash technology on a standalone basis, for prices starting at $1,199.

As extra incentives for customers to begin getting familiar with SSD servers now, Sun is offering 60-day free trials through its Try and Buy program, with discounts for systems of 20% to 40%.