The Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System is ideal for enterprises requiring mission-critical storage and provides dramatically easier and faster ways to manage and scale your storage up to 288 TB[1].

If you are looking into storage systems, you've gotta check these things out. (Sun is not paying me to hype. These things are just making me happy.)

I'm staging two 7410 HA clusters right now. These things are so damn rad. The DTrace Analytics stuff is amazing (watch this, seriously). Even though it uses 7200 RPM drives, the NAND/HD hybrid ZFS storage pool tech makes it super fast. Also due to the usage of slower (and cheaper) drives, the power consumption is super low. While I'm staging, I've got both clusters running off a single 15 amp circuit. That's a total of four heads and two drive racks. No shit.

Support for Active Directory and CIFS is flawless. The LDAP/NIS and ID mapping support is very robust, so no problems with dual MS(CIFS)/*NIX(NFSv3&4) environments.

Also, no god damned RAID. It's all ZFS. That means insanely large volumes without insanely long volume rebuild times after a drive failure. No more RAID!!! W00h00!

Cluster failover takes less than 30 seconds. I've already tested various file operations while failing over the cluster, and the results are good. When hosting VMs off the cluster, there is a pause in all file operations for about 20 seconds, but nothing times out or fails.. In general, that's about as good as it gets.

I'm still in the process of testing out replication to different targets, but so far it seems brain-dead simple to configure, both continuous and scheduled replication.. Everything you'd expect to be able to do with snapshots works perfectly and can be done quickly.

The only complaint I have with it is that the networking is half baked. Out of the default four gig interfaces, you technically lose one on each node in the cluster because of the way it handles port bindings. The same network settings apply to both nodes in a cluster, so in order to have a unique IP for each head unit, you have to bind the address as a private resource to an interface. That means on the opposite node, you can't use the same interface for anything.

Also, while it fully supports multiple interfaces on different VLANs, it doesn't have separate routing instances for different interfaces or allow you to tweak what file sharing protocols (NFS/CIFS/etc) are available on each interface. That means if you want to provide file services to multiple networks, you must have a security gateway in the mix. Plan out your deployment as such..

Good job Sun!