Flash Based RAID
Today at Oracle’s OpenWorld, Scott McNealy mentioned the Sun F5100 Flash Array, which is a RAID comprised of flash devices rather than magnetic media. I had this idea a few years ago, but both the COTS flash devices were insufficiently robust and I didn’t have any funding. But Sun seems to have to put things together quite nicely in a 1U device. Some details from the spec sheet:
- Over 1 million IOPS
- Up to 1.92 TB storage capacity
- 1 RU form factor
- Average power consumed is 300 watts, calculated as 50% reads
- 12.8 GB/sec sequential read rate
- 9.7 GB/sec sequential write rate
- 386 watts active power usage
All this for $45k (in a very scaled down version); I’d guess a fully loaded one would be in the $150k range.
The problem here is the density of the unit will be economically infeasible for now. As I have mentioned before, Sun is playing to the edge cases. I can buy a Dell directly attached 3U storage device and plant 3T of old fashioned disk for about $8k and have room for up to 45T for another $9k or so. To match that with the Sun gear, I’d have to spend somewhere on the order of $3.5M (plus 23U worth of space). Pareto strikes again; this is only going to be interesting to people with extreme needs.
I’m quite sure that the newly rebranded Sun Exadata solution has this as an option, if not the only approach.
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