Today Sun is announcing a new line of Unified Storage designed by a core of the most brilliant engineers . For starters Mike Shapiro provides a great introduction into this product, the new economics behind it and the killer App in Sun Storage 7000.

The killer App is of course Bryan Cantrill's brainchild, the already famous Analytics. As a performance engineer, it's been a great thrill to have given this tool an early test drive. Working a full 1 ocean's (the atlantic) + 1 continent (the USA) away from my system running Analytics I was skeptical at first that I would be visualizing in real time all that information : the NFS/CIFS ops, the disk ops, the CPU load and network throughput, per client, per disk, per file ARE YOU CRAZY ! All that information available IN REAL TIME; I just have to say a big thank you to the team that made it possible. I can't wait to see our customer put this to productive use.

Also check out Adam Levanthal's great description of HSP the Hybrid Storage Pool and read my own perspective on this topic ZFS as a Network Attach Storage Controller.

Lest we forget the immense contribution of the boundless Energy bubble that is Brendan Gregg; the man that braught DTracetoolkit to the semi-geek; he must be jumping with excitement as we now see the power of DTrace delivered to each and every system administrator. He talks here about the Status Dashboard. And Brendan's contribution does not stop here, he is also the parent of this wonderful component of the HSP known as the L2ARC which is how the readzillas become activated. See his own previous work on the L2ARC along with Jing Zhang more recent studies. Quality assurance people don't often get into the spotlight but check out Tim Foster 's post on how he tortured the zpool code adding and removing l2 arc devices from pools :

For myself, it's been very exciting to be able to see performance improvement ideas get turned into product improvements from weeks to weeks. Those interested should read how our group influenced the product that is shipping today, see Alan Chiu and my own Delivering Performance Improvements.

Such a product has a strong Price/Performance appeal and given that we fundamentally did not think that there where public benchmarks that captured our value proposition, we had to come up with a third millenium participative ways to talk about performance. Check out how we designed our Metrics or maybe go straight to our numbers obtained by Amitabha Banerjee a concise entry backed up by immense, intense and carefull data gathering effort in the last few weeks. bmseer is putting his own light on the low level data (data to be updated with numbers from a grander config).

I've also posted here a few performance guiding lights to be used thinking about this product; I call them Performance Invariants. So further numbers can be found here about raid rebuild times.

On the application side, we have the great work of Sean (Hsianglung Wu) and Arini Balakrishnan showing how a 7210 can deliver > 5000 concurrent video streams at an aggregate of, you're kidding, : WOW ZA 750MB/sec. More Details on how this was acheived in cdnperf.

Jignesh Shaw shows step by step instructions setting up PostgreSQL over iSCSI.

See our Vice President, Solaris Data, Availability, Scalability & HPC Bob Porras trying to tame this beast into a nutshell and pointing out code bits reminding everyone of the value of the OpenStorage proposition.

See also what bmseer has to say on Web 2.0 Consolidation and get from Marcus Heckel a walkthrough of setting up Olio Web 2.0 kit with nice Analytics performance screenshots. Also get the ISV reaction (a bit later) from Georg Edelmann. Ryan Pratt reports on Windows Server 2003 WHQL certification of the Sun Storage 7000 line.

And this just in : Data about what to expect from a Database perspective.

We can talk all we want about performance but as Josh Simons points out, these babies are available to you for your own try and buy. Or check out how you could be running the appliance within the next hour really : Sun Storage 7000 in VMware.

It seems I am in competition with another less verbose aggregator Finally capture the whole stream of related posting to Sun Storage 7000