After over a month of speculation and rumors, the Sun F5100 has finally appeared on Sun’s website. Most of the details published earlier were correct; in fact, the performance figures quoted earlier were lower than what’s currently being quoted by Sun.
Sun F5100 front view
The main component are the 80 flash modules; each module offers 24GB of storage, bringing the total storage offered to almost 2TB. Larger 48GB modules are widely expected, but have not been officially announced yet. The modules are backed by four Energy Storage Modules, basically large capacitators that store energy to safely power down in the event of a power failure, and two redundant power supplies.
External connections are provided by 16 4-wide SAS channels. The flash modules are SLC based, with a quoted MTBF of 2 million hours. Sun lists the endurance at “approximately 6 years” for a 50% read/50% write mix. The F5100 is available in three different configurations with 20, 40 and 80 flash modules respectively; the most basic model can be yours for $45.995, while the 80-module version will set you back a hefty $159,995.
Sun F5100 top view
That money does buy you an awful lot of performance in just 1U of rack space, and with a relatively low power usage. I’ve included a table with the most important specs below; but do keep in mind that these are taken from a Sun datasheet that has at least one very obvious error…
Those should be terabytes, right?
| Flash modules | 20 | 40 | 80 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity | 480GB | 960GB | 1920GB |
| Random Read IOPS (4K blocks) | 397,000 | 795,000 | 1,600,000 |
| Random Write IOPS (4K blocks) | 304,000 | 610,000 | 1,200,000 |
| Sequential Reads | 3.2 GB/s | 6.4 GB/s | 12.8 GB/s |
| Sequential Writes | 2.4 GB/s | 4.8 GB/s | 9.7 GB/s |
| Read Latency | 0.378 ms | 0.378 ms | 0.378 ms |
| Write Latency | 0.245 ms | 0.245 ms | 0.245 ms |
| Idle Power | 129W | 157W | 213W |
| Active Power | 228W | 281W | 386W |
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[...] Maxwell discovers a new market for their ultracapacitators Maxwell sent out a press release today about their “new” PC-10 ultracapacitator. In it, they tout the benefits it has for providing backup power for, among others, solid state drives and enterprise storage systems. That comes as no surprise; Sun has shown that capacitators can be used successfully as a backup power source for storage systems by integrating them into their new F5100 system. [...]