Pillar Data - Larry Ellison's other storage company
It's an appliance...
"The Sun 7000 business model, with its commodity hardware aspects, is good news in Oracle-land, but its open source software is not. Not to Oracle, any way. Neither is the bag-of-bits aspect of the 7000's software environment particularly attractive to many customers. Here are the software lego blocks; now build the storage array hardware and software system yourself. No thank you. I want to have an easier time implementing my storage array. Again, this is Pillar talk from the Pillar camp.)"
Oh dear Chris - did you fall asleep during the SUN presentation, or haven't you had an invitation to one yet? The Sun 7000 Unified Storage Device is very much an appliance. Think of it as a cut-price NetApp lacking a few features (but with much faster processors), using relatively slow, large SATA drives boosted (if you are wise) by some flash SSDs, and you aren't too far off the mark (apart from the bottom-of-the-range 7110 which uses 2.5" SAS drives and doesn't have the SSD option). All the hardware, software and so on is supplied by SUN. The software is a carefully controlled, bolted down version of Open Solaris and ZFS, but that doesn't mean that it is anything else but an appliance.
Of course, if your are brave enough, then you can build your own device using the software set, as, indeed, can other vendors. But the SUN 7000 is not a brew-your-own configuration, and if you go round adding your disks to such a config then expect your support from SUN to evaporate.
