BusinessWeek recently interviewed Fishworks' own Mike Shapiro concluding that "Innovation Isn't Just for Startups". It's well worth a read; here's a brief excerpt:

What Shapiro and Cantrill realized from this [examination of the market] was that they had to devise a genuinely "disruptive product" — not just a souped-up version of what was available. Because of the hassle and expense, customers weren't going to scrap their existing data-storage solutions unless Sun came up with something far superior. "We had to cost half as much and be twice as fast," Shapiro says.
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With hundreds of customers out of the gate, the Sun Storage 7000 Series has definitely established itself—and Fishworks, which Shapiro continues to run, could well prove one of the hidden gems of the Oracle acquisition. In the meantime, the new product line stands as powerful proof of what Drucker preached: When it comes to innovation, it's smarts, not size, that matter most.

For more on the story of Fishworks, take a look at Bryan's post on the subject.

The launch event is still several hours away, but the press has been furiously scratching their quills to parchment. A lot of articles are mundanely similar, but Andy Greenberg at Forbes has written an article with some interesting analysis.

But Sun may have a leg up. Gene Ruth, an analyst with research firm Burton Group says that Sun has trumped its competitors by optimizing storage arrays to automatically hold the most frequently accessed files in faster flash memory while less-used information is moved to slower disk drives. That algorithm, which Sun calls its ZFS file system, has the potential to make Sun's system far cheaper and more effective than the competitors', Ruth says.

"The competitors' systems are a novelty, but they don't realize the full potential for flash," he argues. "Sun's big idea is integration of the storage systems’ hardware and software, with a file system that's intelligent enough to know where to place data automatically."

Andrew Reichman from Forrester Research has some cautious praise; we'll take it for now:

"I'm not ready to say that Sun totally has its act together," says Reichman. "But if they continue on this road, they could be on the right track."