That’s a 24 terabyte (!) “Thumper” (Sun X4500) in my trunk under the golf clubs. Jason, Matt and I wandered around Sun yesterday with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore of the Sun ZFS team hunting for “Thumpers”. We really, really wanted to use this new server/storage product from Sun as the foundation for some new products Joyent is rolling out to customers. Unfortunately, while the product was announced on July 14th, Bastille Day, we’ve been told it won’t be available until September, and then in limited quantity.
Tim O’Reilly called the “Thumper” ”…the Web 2.0 server”. I think the basis for that assertion is along the lines of my idea (I’m not claiming attribution) that companies want to be like Google (from an infrastructure standpoint). In Sun’s announcement, Tim makes the argument:
O’Reilly calls Google the prototypical Web 2.0 service, but notes that the company “did it the hard way – they have kind of rolled their own.” Many companies now emulate the Google model, yet they “don’t want to roll their own, or grow [their infrastructure] from the ground up.”
I agree with that assessment. It’s the subject of my earlier post Sunshine.
Which brings me back to our peregrinations around Building 12 at Sun with Jeff and Bill. If Bastille Day was about storming a prison, our Thumper Day yesterday was about storming for product. Jeff and Matt knew we wanted to use “Thumper” and they broke through the typical barriers to entry for Joyent so that we could use “Thumper”. Jeff has bottles of open Advil on his desk a result of all the phone calls he’s been making over the last few days looking for a system Joyent could use. It was fun to listen to Bill barter boxes of AMD Opteron chips for a system. (Sidenote: I think there’s enough equipment sitting in the halls of Sun to standup Joyent’s own data-center down by the river. Think battlefield hospital with all the wounded in the hall waiting for triage.) There was even an encounter with a Scotsman in charge of one of the many inventory pools claiming “dars nothing ay con dew”. We wandered looking for “Thumpers” but were coming up empty handed. As we began to walk down the stairs, I looked up the stairwell to the top floor.
“There’s some more boxes up there,” I said. The expedition paused, not wanting to believe. However, Bill still believed. “That looks like Thumper boxes,” said Bill. Now all eyes looked up as the evening sun began to set in the western sky. “Those are, those ARE Thumper boxes,” said Jeff. We leap up the stairs like we weren’t geeks.
I don’t want to forget to mention the “owner” of the “Thumpers”. Just before we looked up to see the boxes above, we ran into a guy on the stairs. He asked if we were looking for “Thumpers”…just from the look on our faces. “Dear Friends, are you looking for Thumpers?” or “I don’t know why you seek Thumpers amongst the dead.” I don’t exactly remember what he said, but the next thing I knew, we were all looking up and there were “Thumpers”. And when we’d picked the “Thumper” we wanted to take home, from the man’s own shipment of “Thumpers” for his own work, this guardian angel brought us a hand-truck, and helped us out of the building, while the guards slept, as they say.
Only to be met by the Scotsman. Who chuckled to himself. Poor entrepreneurs!
19 Comments
Although it looks big and cool, could you maybe share what these Thumpy-Dealies will do and change for Joyent? Are they just bigger/faster/stronger, or do they offer new possibilities?
Just curious
Tim Bray (who works for sun and has a bigtime blog) talked about them a bit, they do indeed look magnificent.
OK I just need to say, that this is why I bought my lifetime TextDrive subscription. People who will not stop until they get what they need and want, which is usually what their customers demand. Oh, and being ubergeeks helps.
It’s just as heavy as me (77kg). I could fit in that trunk too, if you could just be easy with the clubs on my back.
Nice beast!
When I heard about the Thumper I wondered how long it would be before you guys got one. Quite soon, it seems!
It certainly looks to be a sweet (and heavy) piece of equipment.
Wanderfowl: the Thumpers allow us to begin to offer customers ridiculously great prices on storage coupled with some awesome applications running on the opterons. Stay tuned.
Sounds w00tastic. I’m just shocked that nobody’s made a “Thumpin’ good” pun yet. 24 Terabytes is insane, I can’t wait to see what you all are planning to do with it.
Sounds Thumpin’ Good……
More TextJoy! Now if they would allocate each of our own Thumper
Hey I was at Sun too yesterday! Only I was for the Summer Intern Research Seminar. Those guys had some really cool demos over at Building 16. If only I could have run into Jason in the hallways. Dang!
They’re on the Try-n-Buy list, I’ve been told.
Not sure that helps if there physically aren’t any units, mind
I’m not sure I understand… You just marched around Sun corporate looking for boxes of their equipment? Is this fairly standard practice, or do you guys have some significantly over-sized cojones?
24 Terabytes sounds like plenty of storage for strongspace. I wonder if Sun has listened to Joyent about customer service. Have they started to sell direct? Will they start to do that in the future?
Sun wants customers who will standardize on their technology. Joyent has seen the light, and in my opinion is blazing a trail which many other companies will follow. My prediction is that Sun will begin selling direct.
Site note, in IE your blog first page has the content under the navigation area. Once you click through to a story the formatting is fixed.
Thanks for the heads up; we’ll check out what’s up with joyeur.com on IE.
This is another one of Andy Bechtolsheim’s masterpieces. This is the absolute Cadillac Escolade of Servers. Media Server for all my DVDs? Man, when’s costco going to sell these?
Anyone know of a x4500-like device that costs less and has room for half the storage?
$33k for 14 terabytes is a little more than we need, but $15k for 6 terabytes would be a lot better.
Joe Van Dyk: Apple’s XServe RAID has the storage, but not the processor.