Sun announced SSDs in its x64, chip multi-threaded (CMT) rack and blade systems. Selected Sun x64 and CMT systems are available for free 60-day trials via Sun's so-called Try and Buy program, with up to 20-to-40 percent discounts.

One of the first major vendors to announce an end-to-end SSD strategy in early 2008, Sun has integrated the storage technology into its Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage family and now has introduced SSDs into its leading server portfolio.

The computer maker has been offering SSDs for its systems since last March, said Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis (Los Gatos, Calif.).

At first, Sun qualified SSDs from Intel, Handy said. Now, Sun has also qualified SSDs from STEC, he said. The real key is that Sun has ''tuned'' its proprietary software technology with flash for its systems, he added.

Sun takes a systems design approach to SSD integration across software, systems and storage. This holistic systems approach helps customers achieve up to 65x faster response times, up to eight times better throughput, and up to 38 percent less power consumption than servers with traditional hard disk drives, according to Sun.

Sun's so-called Solaris ZFS technology is said to 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.

Sun also today announced the Sun Flash Analyzer, a 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.

By: DocMemory
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