Sun Microsystems announced the release of a new series of appliances that includes advanced management software and solid state drives (SSDs).

The new line is called Sun Storage 7000 and includes three systems that range from 2T bytes to 576T bytes and run Sun's Open Solaris and ZFS (Zettabyte File System) on industry-standard x86 computing hardware. Sun's FISHworks (Fully Integrated Software and Hardware) group developed a new software for monitoring and management which was included in the new systems.

The company encountered some significant problems in this year’s third quarter, recording a loss of over $1.5 billion, with its revenue falling more than 7 percent. This was also caused by the offers of its competitors, as EMC and Hewlett-Packard keep their positions on the market strong. Other companies involved with developing systems with solid-state technology include Dell and IBM.

Sun’s storage business is one of the company’s fastest-growing divisions and it is expected to provide a significant support in its efforts for a strong comeback.

Graham Lovell, senior director of open storage at Sun, presented the new line, saying that it was designed to be easy to manage and also to provide detailed information on the use of the storage. The FISHworks software lists all the users accessing the device, provides information about the applications used by each one and also shows which files they are using. Sun’s incorporated SSDs provide very high performance at low costs, with its tiered system using both solid-state and disk-based capacity. The SSDs replace the expensive NVRAM (non-volatile random access memory) and Mr. Lovell explained that the largest Sun Storage 7000 appliance can be equipped with 16 SSDs, each offering 18G bytes of capacity.

"Certainly open storage is one of the bright spots in the storage industry," explained John Fowler, executive vice president for systems at Sun. The company announced that new storage appliances and software upgrades are planned for release in 2009, as Sun is looking to boost its market shares. The entire proprietary storage products business is estimated at about $40 billion and the company believes that its efforts could result in a significantly bigger coverage of this segment which would translate into bigger revenues.

Sun's new Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is also known as the Amber Road and the three products are the entry-level Storage 7110, with offers up to 2TB of storage; the 7210 with up to 48TB of storage; and the high-end 7410 with up to 288TB of storage. Solid state disks will only be available with the second and the third model, and while the entry-level system is already in production, the other two are scheduled for release over the next few weeks.

Sun presents the new system as an extremely helpful add-on for its clients, with two-four times the performance, 10 times faster installation and also a fraction of the energy consumption of traditional storage.

The product line begins with a low-end $10,000 model that stores two terabytes of data and extends to over $89,000 for a 12-terabyte model.