I read over the specs of Sun’s new mid-range storage models, the StorageTek 6140 and 6540, which were announced yesterday (8/11/2006) and the corners of my mouth must have visibly sank after scanning through the specs and not seeing the one big feature I was hoping to see in any new arrays from Sun. This feature is iSCSI.
Don’t worry, I checked and double-checked, and iSCSI is not a feature. With there being only 100Mb-capable ethernet ports on the controllers and not 1Gb, there’s also no holding out hope that it could be a feature-add at some point in the future.
Unless I’m overlooking some extraordinary feature that these two new arrays introduce, these are just re-skinned logical upgades of what Sun has always offered. 4Gb Fibre Channel and 4GB of cache. Higher IOPs. In one respect, that’s all nice and stuff, but it’s not like anyone could claim that they didn’t see that coming.