Today at Sun we're all bouncing off the walls because today Sun launches the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Series (code name "Amber Road"), the world's first open storage appliances. Words like "disruptive", "revolutionary", "transformative" and "radical" have been used to describe the new Sun Storage 7110, 7210, and 7410 Unified Storage Systems. Deserved or hype? I can think of three things off the bat that argue for deserved:

• an Open Architecture
• ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools and
• unprecedented, unheard of Storage Analytics.

ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools are storage stacks made from a mix of DRAM, Flash/SSD and SATA. ZFS manages this storage hierarchy as one transparent pool optimizing it to leverage the best attributes of each device. This optimization means the best performance (at about 25% the cost of traditional storage) and best energy-efficiency possible. ZFS's optimizations yields a 3.2 times faster Read IOPS, 11% faster Write IOPS and a 2 times faster raw capacity. ZFS not only optimizes for speed it also constantly runs data integrity checks to prevent any data corruption. It's not only fast, it's good.

Storage Analytics The 7000 Class Systems has a browser user interface (BUI) that radically simplifies administration tasks like configuration, maintenance (including hardware), checking shares (the 7000 line exports files systems as shares) and status (current usage of CPU, memory, storage, network, services, hardware, CIFS, NDMP, NFSv3 and v4, and iSCSI - it's pretty comprehensive and all on one page!) and, most wonderfully, DTrace analytics. In the storage world robust analytics on workloads in production just haven't existed. Now an administrator is able to look at a problem in real time - all while systems continue running in production. The Storage Analytics uses a drill-down analysis - checking the higher level statistics first and then going into finer detail based on previous findings. So, for example, things are moving along smoothly and suddenly performance is bad. With the Storage Analytics you can now ask: How many IOPS is the system doing? Which clients are causing a spike in IOPS? Let's say it's a CIFS protocol causing the problem; from that data point you'll then drill down and ask, Which Windows Client is going crazy? Is it doing more reads or writes? Which file is it reading or writing to? Before you would have been stopped at the second question. Now life is good. An administrator can quickly identify and diagnose system performance issues, and debug storage and network problems. Find it quick and fix it quick without shutting anything down. Pretty amazing. So far ahead of anything else available, you might even call it disruptive.

Sun doesn't stop at great open architecture, open storage appliances, revolutionary features like ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools, and get-it-no-where-else Storage Analytics. Sun follows up the 7000 class systems with great services. Our Professional Services is ready to help your storage migration with our Sun Unified Storage Data Migration Service. Sun's experts will migrate your storage systems quickly and securely saving you time and bringing you the full benefits of all the 7000 series features.

Now's my time to brag. My daughter's friends recently found an old TV for their college apartment. In exchange for some development on the TV repairman's web site, their old TV is now broadcasting Red Sox games in high def to a very appreciative, and broke, college crowd. A resourceful crowd that somehow managed to scrape up the $ for cable service.

What these enterprising young college students did was take something offered for free, and tune it up in a way that fit with their economic model - or rather - their meager wallets. And the cable company benefits. A lot like what happens with the many developers out there joining open source communities. They take the software for free, use it, change it to fit their needs, give something back to the community, and then think about paying for commercial service to enhance their free experience.

Earlier this week IBM announced they are joining the OpenOffice.org community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software... to help expand the use of the Open Document Format (ODF) ... to donate accessibility features from their work on Lotus Notes.

Seems like this is a good thing for consumers. Definitely worth all the noise.