Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array

The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array is the world’s fastest and most power efficient flash array for accelerating database applications. It redefines database performance, cutting transaction times in half and doubling application throughput. The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array lets you scale your performance and capacity needs efficiently without impacting data availability so you can meet your growing business needs.

Features and Benefits

The Sun Storage F5100 Array Flash redefines how databases perform, accelerating application response times and delivering unprecedented speed, scale, and cost savings. It delivers the performance of over 3,000 disk drives while consuming 100x less power and space than traditional disk solutions. Businesses can instantly speed up their database performance in new or existing environments without data migration or extensive tuning needs.

Key Benefits

• Faster application response times
• Increased efficiency
• Lower space and energy costs
• Breakthrough price/performance, space/performance and power/performance
• Greater productivity and lower TCO Features and Benefits
• Unprecedented Performance
• Unmatched Power and Space Efficiency
• Easy to Use and Manage

Unprecedented Performance

World record performance

The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array’s blazing performance delivers over 1.6 million read and 1.2 million write IOPS to accelerate applications quickly and efficiently while consuming very little power or space.

The array reduces latency and eliminates storage-related I/O bottlenecks that slow down application response times. And it’s optimized for heavy read and write I/O workload applications, such as Oracle OLTP databases, indexes, hot tables, and data structures, where I/O performance, high transactional throughput, and low latency are the most critical to improve business productivity, efficiency and cost.

Plus, you can take advantage of Oracle ASM or Solaris ZFS to automate data management, enhance data protection, and optimize storage hierarchy for maximum performance and lowest cost.

Over 1.6M IOPS

Thanks to its unique, high performance and high-density design, the Sun Storage F5100 delivers the I/O performance of over 3,000 15K RPM disk drives in 1RU of rack space while consuming only 300 watts of average power (50%/50% read/write). That’s 1/100th the space and power of disk drives.

Flash technology improves application response times

The Sun Storage F5100 is based on high-performance, high-reliability Single Level Cell (SLC) non-volatile, solid-state technology designed to deliver maximum amounts of I/O performance with minimum amounts of power and space. With 64 SAS lanes (16 x 4-wide ports), 4 domains and SAS zoning, the array assures maximum performance throughput and configuration flexibility for easy deployment and scalability.

Unmatched Power and Space Efficiency

Reduced power, space, and cooling costs

The eco-efficient Sun Storage F5100 contains no rotating media, which helps you lower energy costs compared to spinning disks. Its high I/O throughput and density also enable you to increase utilization and reduce space requirements.

The array uses only 1/100th the space and power of 300 watts of traditional storage for the same performance level, enabling you to reduce storage and operating costs up to 90%. Plus, you get greater performance and eco-efficiency, which significantly reduces I/O bottlenecks, eliminates disk over purchases, and improves server utilization.

The array delivers 200x time better IOPS/watt of power and 500x times better IOPS/RU than hard disk drives at similar performance levels. What’s more, the Sun Storage F5100 virtually eliminates the need for massive pools of costly and power-hungry 15K RPM mechanical disk drives. Instead, you can deploy more economical high-capacity disk drives.

High reliability

The Sun Storage F5100 was designed from the ground up to deliver the highest level of reliability, with advanced wear leveling, data protection, RAID, mirroring, solid state robustness and 2 million hours MTBF Flash Modules. The system also uses the Solaris Fault Management Architecture (FMA) to quickly detect and diagnose problems before your applications are affected.

Enterprise-class solid-state Flash technology

The array’s combination of high-reliability, non-volatile SLC enterprise-class solid-state Flash technology and advanced ECC, wear-leveling, and redundant power and cooling delivers the highest level of robustness, durability, and write endurance. The Sun Storage F100 Flash Modules are rated for 2 million hours MTBF, which is higher than enterprise disk drives.

Integrated backup protection

To assure no data loss and protect your critical applications in the event of sudden power loss, the F5100 incorporates super capacitor backed Energy Storage Modules for write cache and meta-data protection to assure highest level of data integrity.

Helps prevent data corruption

The Sun Storage F5100 supports host based RAID protection provided by Oracle ASM, Solaris ZFS and others. When used with Solaris, the array takes advantage of data-integrity features in Solaris ZFS, including automatic data integrity checking and correction with block level checksums. When a corrupt block is identified, the self-healing features in Solaris ZFS will direct another copy to be written as an automatic repair, preventing silent data corruption.

Host based mirroring is available through native OS SVM, Oracle VSM, or Veritas VxVM.

Easy to Use and Manage

Disk emulation

The Sun Storage F5100 is easy to install and use in new and existing computing environments. You can turbocharge your I/O intensive database applications quickly and efficiently without expensive tuning. The system emulates ultra-high-performance disk drives, and is fully compatible with existing systems and applications.

Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager software

The Sun Storage F5100 comes with Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager software, which provides a common, simple-to-use interface for all your Sun Storage arrays. The software takes the complexity out of storage management, enabling you to accelerate deployment, simplify your environment, and improve utilization.

The Common Array Manager Service Advisor also offers proactive health checking and supports quick time to service. System error messages are connected directly to specific repair procedures in Sun’s knowledge base, making common repairs simple and easy.