It takes more than a single engineering team to put together a product as large and complicated as the Sun Storage 7000 series. While we developed the appliance software, we relied on countless others to build the base technology in Solaris, test our software, and the countless other jobs required to bring a product to market. While there are obviously too many to name everyone in one post, what follows is a (woefully incomplete) list of those who went above and beyond the call of duty in helping us make this project a reality:

• Our test team, without which our product would barely work. Special thanks to Bryan Haskins for leading the effort, and the clustering A-team (Mike Harsch, Karen Methfessel, Dan Atherton, Mark Butler, and others) for the extra long hours down the stretch.
• The ZFS team, for tirelessly implementing our RFEs and fixing the bugs found by our test team. A special shout out to Matt Ahrens for making remote replication possible, Mark Maybee for whipping the ARC into shape (and leading the ZFS team with Matt), and Neil Perrin for making logzilla a reality.
• The iSCSI team, for making the iSCSI target implementation rock solid while still working on the next generation storage target infrastructure. Thanks especially to Tim Szeto for his push to quash bugs in the waning months of development.
• The CIFS team, for all their work in creating a robust, scalable CIFS server. Special thanks for Afshin Salek, Natalie Li, Jose Borrego, Alan Wright, and Nico Williams for their tireless debugging efforts.
• The NDMP team, for their hard work on our many RFEs and bugs. Thanks especially to Reza Sabdar and Barry Greenberg.
• Roch Bourbonnais and the PAE team, who did terrific work that yielded a much higher-performing product.
• Rob Johnston from the FMA team, who did the legwork to get power supplies and fans into libtopo.
• Our beta and early eval customers, for helping us focus on what really matters, and keeping our queue full of cool RFEs.
• Our spouses, kids, families, and significant others, for bearing with us in the final weeks(/months/years) and supporting us throughout the project.

For those of you we forgot, do not fear. We are grateful for every contribution, no matter how small, that helped us create this truly revolutionary product line.

The launch event for the Sun Storage 7000 Series is about to start.

Check out the live video stream and chat room.

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."

Today Sun launches the Sun Storage 7000 series of appliances. Rather than rehash information available elsewhere, here are a few links for people who want to dive deeper into the products and technology.

• Launch event (3:30 PST)
• Official Sun Storage 7000 Series Homepage
• A technical overview by Mike Shapiro
• In-depth technical videos with members of the Fishworks team
• Downloadable virtual machine images
• Engineering blogs
• Marketing video introduction

As with any product launch of this magnitude, there is an overwhelming amount of information that we want to get out into the public. We (the Fishworks engineering team) will be aggregating technical information on this blog to the best of our ability, so check back here or subscribe to the feed to keep up to date with any developments.

There is much talk about the launch of the Sun Storage 7000 series of appliance based on Fishworks technology. We will be linking to noteworthy blogs here throughout the day for people who want to take a deeper dive into the technology.

• Mike Shapiro with an overview of the products
• Bryan Cantrill on the history of Fishworks
• Adam Leventhal on hybrid storage pools
• Eric Schrock on hardware integration
• Keith Wesolowski on clustering
• Brendan Gregg on the dashboard
• Todd Patrick on the interface design for projects
• Cindi McGuire with some introductory thoughts on Fishworks
• Roch Bourbonnais on performance improvements
• Bill Pijewski on Windows features and interoperability
• Roch Bourbonnais on performance metrics
• Dave Pacheco on HTTP/WebDAV integration
• Bill Pijewski on kiosk users and session annotations
• BM Seer on a variety of aspects of performance. [1] [2] [3] [4]