Well, the Sun Storage 7000 line of products, or as Sun call them, the open storage, is growing in terms of installed base, functionalities, models, in a nutshell: it’s maturing!
There are a lot of intriguing aspects about the 7000s, the intelligent use of SSDs, the ease of use, usability, the licensing model, scalability, the architecture (ZFS first of all). But what i like, above all, is that this is the most rapidly refreshing line of storage products in the world! The use of commodity hardware permits to have the best of breed at a low cost, and every time Sun updates OpenSolaris (the software base of open storage) we’ll see a new update in few months. Every customers will be able to use new features, when they are available, at no cost!!! In a nutshell: sparkling!
A new OpenSolaris was released few days ago, comprises a lot of new features, further on, new CPUs are coming from AMD (after the 6 core we will se soon the 8 and 12 cores) this will surely lead to a new version of Sun Storage 7000 software before spring!
But, as you know, the world is not perfect, the 7000 lacks in one of the most important pieces to complete its offering: a virtualizer. (something like NetApp V or IBM SVC).
A Sun 7000V would give a lot of advantages for customers (indeed, the same advantages of adopting similar technologies from other vendors) and for Sun (for a most broadly adoption of the 7000!).
The ability to virtualize storage is very important: customers can reuse their actual (un-featured) SANs at a lower costs, and projects can benefit new features derived from the virtualizer!
Hey Sun, when we will be able to see a 7000V?
ES