Wiping the sweat from his brow, Fishworks Engineer Bryan Cantrill reflects on the release of the new major Sun Storage 7000 series software update, known as 2010.Q1. Producing this release was no mean feat, Cantrill writes, given that it involved building enterprise-grade storage on commodity components, incorporating entirely new elements like Flash, and creating an ambitious management stack entirely from scratch.

Hybrid storage pools (HSPs) enable users to deploy multiple types of storage media together and manage them as a single pool. An Oracle-Sun white paper provides insight into HSPs and discusses their primary benefits, including increased throughput without a full-scale SSD deployment; simplified and centralized management of hybrid storage environments; increased flexibility and scalability for future performance or capacity issues; and much more.

The power to achieve better performance with fewer drives - lowering acquisition, support and operational costs - is what Sun proposes the Sun Storage 6180 Array offers customers. It also scales and integrates seamlessly all the way up to the flagship Sun Storage 6780 Array. Offering redundant components, the Sun Storage 6180 Array provides automated I/O path failover, and extensive online configuration, reconfiguration and maintenance capabilities.