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Today Sun launched the Sun Storage 7000 family of unified storage systems. I was going to write my blog on my flight to DFW today, but there is only so much you can do on a packed regional jet, especially when Dallas is having Texas sized thunderstorms.

So instead, I will point you to Bob Porras' blog which does an outstanding job of highlighting the software architecture and design principles behind Open Storage

But for those that want a more basic explanation of the Sun Storage 7000 family, here you go. Lets start with a simple observation. Most people buying a compute cluster for HPC applications, web infrastructure, or just for ordinary business applications, recognize long ago that an x86 server is a commodity. Take a couple of Intel or AMD x86 CPUs, some memory, a couple of disk drives, and your choice of open source and freely available operating systems like OpenSolaris or Linux, add a little sheet metal and a power supply or two, and you have yourself a server. Why does this work? Well, for starters, over 3500 types of systems run OpenSolaris today, and at least that many run Linux if you count the various flavors. And with over 11,000 applications available on OpenSolaris, you are pretty sure to find the software you want too.

But then comes storage. For some reason, the economics of open source and industry standard components, previous to today, have escaped the world of storage. Well, the economics have just changed. As Bob points out, OpenSolaris today has just about every bit of storage functionality you could think of built-in. And just so happens Sun has a pretty robust line of x86 servers and JBODs too. Put the two together with a few additional innovations like SSD and you get the Sun Storage 7000 line.

So three simple take-aways to explain to your finance controller why you need to buy a Sun Storage 7000 product today.

Low risk and low cost. At a fraction of competing products, the Sun Storage 7000, built out of commodity components, changes the economics of storage just like x86 clusters did to the world of proprietary servers a decade ago. Not convinced, our Try & Buy program removes the risk, giving you 60 days to try the product with zero commitment. We even pay the return shipping if you decide not to keep it.

Breakaway performance. OK, your finance controller isn't easily swayed by marketing claims and will want to know how that is possible. Tell her it is because the Sun Storage 7000 uses hybrid storage pools, with the ZFS file system automatically taking advantage of available SSDs for read cache and write logs to make slower, less expensive disk drives perform better than the most expensive, top of the line, disks you would otherwise have to buy.

Built-in Analytics. Utilizing DTrace capabilities built into OpenSolaris, the Sun Storage 7000 provides you real time observability into the performance of your storage unlike anything that was possible before.

And with all that, I think we will see some Texas sized thunder clouds building over the storage industry quite soon.