A different modus operandi

Adam Leventhal brings it to a concise point where the new Sun Storage 7000 systems are really different from other systems besides of this cool administration interface:

Further, you can design the specific system you need with just the right balance of write IOPS, read IOPS, throughput, capacity, power-use, and cost. Once you have a system, the Hybrid Storage Pool lets you solve problems with targeted solutions. Need capacity? Add disk. Out of read IOPS? Toss in another Readzilla or two. Write bogging down? Another Logzilla will net you another 10,000 write IOPS. In the old model, of course, all problems were simple because the solution was always the same: buy more fast drives. The HSP in the 7410 lets you address the specific problem you're having without paying for a solution to three other problems that you don't have.

At the end, one of the core differentiators are the hybrid storage pools. ZFS gives us with the HSP an important advantage. Furthermore it makes difficult questions simple. For example mirroring write caches in RAID controllers: Many of our competitors use special interconnects to mirror the cache from one controller to another. When your write cache is a drive in a JBOD you don´t have to mirror the cache, you just import the drive to the surviving filer node.

Many problems become simple, when you think about them from another perspective ... you just have to start to think.

This gives for Sun and the Opensolaris community an important lead: It may be easy to replicate the GUI, it may be easy just to take commodity hardware, but it isn´t easy to copy dtrace and it isn´t easy to copy ZFS.