Sun today announced new Unified Storage Appliances, the 7000 series (a.k.a. Amber Road). Comprised of the Sun Storage 7110, 7210 and 7410, the new systems have the distinction of being the "first three appliances in the Open Storage portfolio," according to the company.

Here's a quick breakdown of the new gear:

• Sun Storage 7110: Ultra compact model with two terabytes (TB) of storage;
• Sun Storage 7210: Mid-range storage featuring up to 48 TB of storage capacity in a highly dense four unit form factor; includes support for write-optimized solid state disks (SSDs) that leverage Sun's unique Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology;
• Sun Storage 7410: Highly configurable storage system with support for up to a half petabyte (PB) of capacity that includes support for read and write optimized SSDs and Sun's unique Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology; These systems are also available in clustered configurations for added high availability.

This being a green IT blog and all, my interest was piqued by mentions of Solaris ZFS Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology. According to the company:

Sun's unique Hybrid Storage Pool technology uses the 128-bit ZFS filesystem to transparently manage DRAM, read-optimized Flash devices and low-cost, low-power disk drives as a single caching hierarchy. The Hybrid Storage Pools deliver greater performance than traditional storage systems at significantly lower power consumption and reduced cost per gigabyte. Hybrid Storage Pools are then used to store data for file and block protocols, like CIFS and NFS, and can deliver a rich set of enterprise data services, including clustering and data replication.

Or put simply by Jonathan Schwartz, "the net result is a massive speedup in storage performance, with an equivalently massive drop in power consumption."

On the surface and from a technical perspective, it makes a lot sense. You can see why Sun is pursuing SSD storage in a talk delivered by Andy Bechtolsheim at SNIA SDC in September.