1. Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems:
The Core of an Accelerated
MCAE Workflow
A family of appliances that radically simplifies
storage with breakthrough price/performance.
The challenge model updates. Completed simulation
Mechanical Computer Aided Engineering datasets are available immediately for
(MCAE), Analysis and Simulation in subsequent post processing and visuali-
product development is facing ever more zation by all entities in the workflow,
complexity With data-sets doubling every facilitating collaboration amongst
year, growing model sizes and fidelity, design teams and shortening design
and complex coupled physics techniques, time. Parallel Cluster Computing and
engineering organizations around the high performance access to shared
world are under increasing pressure to filesystems greatly enhance this solution.
deliver innovation cost effectively and on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage also
schedule—often with no more resources. simplifies storage management and
Today’s modern HPC clusters consisting protects vital data with elegant Snapshot
of hundreds of multi-core processors data protection, providing quick and easy
provide ever more computational power, recovery of deleted or corrupted files,
but conventional disk-based storage and shortening back-up windows.
architectures have fallen far behind in
Highlights providing access to the data these data
• Superior performance and
lower energy consumption at Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems accelerate MCAE
up to 75% less the cost of
competitive solutions
workflow by speeding data to processors and then providing
• Active-active architecture option shared data access to all.
enables high performance and
high availability
hungry processors require. In addition, Closing the critical processor-storage
• Optimized storage hierarchy with competitive pressures driving time to latency gap on demanding MCAE data
Hybrid Storage Pools containing market make accelerating workflow access patterns
DRAM, SSD, and HDD drives productivity an imperative—driving Today’s high performance multi core
• Scalability in multiple dimensions shared access to model data, simulation processors are capable of accessing and
to adapt to your changing business and results files among all constituents consuming data far in excess of what
needs by increasing compute in the MCAE workflow. conventional disk-based storage architec-
power, storage capacity, or tures can provide. Modern CPUs are
Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage
performance independently capable of processing nearly one million
Solutions accelerate MCAE workflow
Input/Output Operations Per Second
• Eco-efficiency due to reduced by first; accelerating I/O between
(IOPS), far outstripping today’s fastest
power consumption of SSD and processors in the cluster and stored data,
disk drives which are only capable of 300-
HDD disk drives rather than high and second; providing shared access to
400 IOPS—creating a gaping latency gap.
RPM drives all stored data. All cluster nodes see the
A latency gap that starve these blazingly
same file system allowing real time data
fast multi core microprocessors for data.
Sun Microsystems: Solution Brief

2. 2
Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems:
The Core of an Accelerated MCAE Workflow
Sun has developed an innovative storage mechanical disk drives, unlocking new packaged, Hybrid Storage Pool
architecture specifically optimized to keep levels of performance and cost effective- Architecture enabled, 7220 Unified
up—the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage ness. Requiring no administrator interven- Storage Appliance scalable to 48 TB, up
System with ground breaking Hybrid tion, ZFS transparently caches data on to the high performance, high capacity,
Storage Pool technology. The Sun Storage SSDs, dramatically reducing latency and Hybrid Storage Pool Architecture enabled
7000 Hybrid Storage Pool (available on I/O performance bottlenecks. Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage Appliance scalable
7210 and 7410 models) deftly combines 7000 Unified Storage System utilizing to 288 TB capacity.
strategically positioned lightning-fast Hybrid Storage Pool technology and the
Real-time visibility radically simplifies the
flash-based Solid State Drives (SSD) with ZFS filesystem provide the high perform- way you manage data
the advanced data placement capabilities ance shared storage and throughput Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage provides
of the Zettabyte File system (ZFS) to today’s MCAE parallel computational an intuitive environment for administra-
dramatically improve application cluster require. tion tasks, visualizing concepts and
performance and operating efficiency analyzing performance data. DTrace
Sun’s Open Storage architecture spurs
at substantially reduced cost compared to innovation and lowers costs analytics capabilities include real time
conventional storage systems. The ZFS Traditional storage architectures have statistical graphs to help locate and
file system transparently manages data been closed and proprietary, creating isolate problems, and optimize storage
placement, directing frequently used vendor “lock-in” to a slowly innovating performance and capacity utilization.
data to fast SSDs and less-frequently technology platform and creating a huge DTrace drill down analytics quickly narrow
used data to slower mechanical disks. barrier to exit when attempting respond the focus to the most likely troubled areas
The application data set can now be quickly to market forces with alternative (network bytes/sec, NFS ops/sec, disc
completely isolated from slower solutions. Sun Open Storage combines ops/sec, CPU utilization) while an easy to
open-source software with industry stan- read dashboard summarizes the status
dard hardware, enabling you to reduce of the appliance software and hardware
your reliance on high-priced systems and and displays status for disk usage, main
save up to 90% on storage costs. memory usage, appliances services (NFS,
Application CIFS, http, etc.), hardware, activities
A scalable family of appliances meeting
every MCAE shared storage need statistics, and recent appliance alerts.
ZFS The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Services and support
System family of products provide an Sun’s deep technical expertise and proven
open, non-proprietary, affordable solution implementation and migration tools
Write Cache Read Cache Disk Pool
that utilizes SSD enabled Hybrid Storage makes it easy to deploy the Sun Storage
Pool technology, Storage Analytics and 7000 Unified Storage System and help
Fault Management Architecture with the you architect, implement, manage and
SSDs HDDs ZFS filesystem to provide highly reliable, support your entire network infrastruc-
Hybrid Storage Pool
file based, high performance I/O services ture. Sun Services mitigate the risk of
In the Series 7000 Hybrid Storage Pool, SSDs for MCAE applications running on a high downtime, data loss, and costly delays
are used to store actively used data, making performance computational cluster. The and provide the expertise to help ensure
the entire storage infrastructure appear as family ranges from the extremely cost that your systems are running at an
fast as flash storage to applications. effective 7110 Unified Storage Appliance optimal level right from the start.
scaling to 2 TB to the extremely densely
Sun Microsystems, Inc. 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA Phone 1-650-960-1300 or 1-800-555-9SUN Web sun.com
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