Unless you have two or three or nine of these things and you spread data around. For the $ 1M that they claim a petabyte from Sun costs, they're able to make nine of their pods.
It is the claim of the cost from Sun that I am sceptical about. I admit that it will be more expensive, and I know that as someone from academia I end up with discounts, but by my reckoning it is about half that price for bulk purchases from Sun.
One day (as far as I know not yet) Sun will release 1.5 or even 2TB drives and close the gap further.
Also, I suspect that I could get something like the Satabeast (regardless of what people think about it) for significantly less than that per petabyte.
Just because they don't don't have redundancy and checksumming on the box doesn't mean it doesn't exists higher up in their stack. :)
As far as I can work out you end up needing more storage which has a cost associated with it, the higher up the stack you put the redundancy and checksumming.
Overall, the product is what it is. There is nothing wrong with it in the right situation although they have trimmed some corners that I wouldn't have trimmed in their place. However, comparing it to a NetAPP or an EMC is to grossly misrepresent the market. This is the equivalent of seeing how many USB drives you can plug in as a storage solution. I've seen this done.
Julian -- Julian King Computer Officer, University of Cambridge, Unix Support _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
