Chris framed the review against the increasing trend of centralized
storage in the datacenter, and said the most unique part of the system
is Sun’s use of "solid state to drive performance out of the commodity
SATA drives in the array."

As part of an introduction to the product line, Chris discussed the use
of highly scalable storage solutions built on commodity hardware and
open software components. Compared to other vendors, Chris noted that
Sun is "taking the approach of offering all current and future software
features as part of the standard hardware cost. This extends to the
lifetime of the technology, so as new software features are made
available in future releases, the customer can simply upgrade the USS
and take advantage of them at no extra cost."

Overall the reviewer was quite positive about the Sun Storage 7210,
noting that Sun has differentiated its offering from other "server as a
storage array" solutions. "From a hardware perspective, what’s more
interesting is the use of solid state to drive performance out of the
commodity SATA drives in the array," he stated.

Chris concluded by noting in his next post, he’ll be examining ZFS in
more depth.

I am eagerly looking forward to the rest of the series…