More (and less) about the Sun F5100

After the discovery of documentation about Sun’s F5100 flash array two weeks ago, the internet was full of speculation about when it would be launched. The Register expects the final product to be revealed by Oracle as part of a demo machine that will shatter the TPC-C performance benchmark:

Now, on Tuesday afternoon, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive officer, and John Fowler, the general manager of Sun’s System group, are going to unveil “an innovative new product” which the two are billing as “the world’s first OLTP database machine with Sun FlashFire technology.”

So will this talk later today be about the F5100? It appears that The Register is right on this one, but I doubt we’ll see the name F5100 used. Oracle likes to use more exciting naming schemes; my bet is that they’ll reuse the Exadata name. The Exadata server is currently built on HP hardware; I think we’ll see an Exadata 2 or Exadata Flash machine that is completely Oracle-branded.

Sun has taken a head start and has been busy removing all references to the F5100 from their site. Just two weeks ago, there were 8 references to F5100 documentation on their site:

Sun F5100 documentation

All the docs in the documentation section itself have been removed; over half the links Google has to F5100 documentation now point to non-existing URL’s or notices saying the documentation has been deleted.

Update: Well, that was a bit of a disappointment. The system is indeed called the Exadata 2, and it’s built using servers we already know from Sun. The storage subsystem is powered by Sun Fire X4275 servers, using either SSD, SAS or SATA drives. SSD can be used as a cache, which according to Oracle enables the use of cheaper SATA drives as secondary storage. The total storage speed should be around 1 million IOPS for a full rack of machines, including the systems that are running the actual database frontend. A nice number, but after hearing the rumors about a single 1U box that could achieve the same I’m not that impressed.

Related posts:

1. F5100: 1U, 4TB flash storage from Sun
2. Sun F5100 finally appears
3. Does the world need Triple Parity RAID?
4. Isilon adding SSD options to scale-out NAS
5. Imation announces first 1.6 TB LTO-5 tapes