"The Sun Storage 7000 family may well be in a class by itself. The embedded hardware functionality and list of software add-ons are remarkable for the price of this appliance," said John Webster, principal IT advisor of research firm Illuminata. "This new family has the potential to become the most disruptive thing Sun has ever done in storage."

The world's first Open Storage appliances, "the new Sun Storage 7000 family offers a new, simple way to use storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems and has the potential to forever change the way businesses and enterprises store and manage rapidly growing amounts of data- their most important asset," he adds.

The Unified Storage Systems "radically simplify the way information is managed and can deliver up to 75 per cent cost/performance savings to customers," said John Fowler, executive vice-president, systems group, Sun Microsystems.

Open Storage portfolio

Sun has released the first three appliances in the Open Storage portfolio, each of which include a fully-integrated software stack with support for a variety of operating environments; standard high speed networking and tape connectivity and the industry's most comprehensive management software with powerful analytics tools. These systems are also the only storage systems that fully exploit Flash Hybrid Storage Pools within Solaris ZFS to automatically accelerate and optimise performance while lowering power and cooling requirements. The three products are: