New enterprise flash-powered servers from Sun

Sun Microsystems announced the availability of robust solid state drive (SSD) Flash technology in its x64, chip multi-threaded (CMT) Rack and Blade systems.

Sun’s x64 and CMT servers and blade systems are already among the industry’s best performing and most efficient platforms for virtualization as well as enterprise, Web, database and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Sun’s x64 servers and blade systems support multiple chip architectures, including UltraSPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors; as well as operating systems like Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), Open Solaris, Linux, Windows and VMware.

Sun designed its Solaris ZFS, the first and only file system optimized for Flash, that offers increased performance and minimal downtime. Solaris ZFS can combine DRAM, SSDs, and traditional hard drives into a “Hybrid Storage Pool,” which provides customers with the speed of Flash SSDs and the economies of hard drives. In November 2008, Sun also introduced the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems with integrated Flash for dramatically reduced storage I/O bottlenecks, never-before-seen storage analytics capabilities, and a greatly simplified management interface.

Sun also today announced the Sun Flash Analyzer, the industry’s first and only tool that gives customers insight into their SSD-based servers to understand how to increased application performance. This new tool detects I/O intensive applications that can best leverage Flash technology and will then make suggestions about ways to improve system performance. The Sun Flash Analyzer runs on Solaris 10 OS, Windows and Linux operating environments.

Enterprise-grade SSD Flash technology is available starting at $1,199. Integrated server systems start at $3,240 for the Sun Fire X6250 Blade system.