Storage has been like a penitential chain around Sun’s neck and it’s left unspeakable gouges.

Sun’s $4.1 billion acquisition of StorageTek was one of the reasons the company wrote off $1.4 billion of its business in the September quarter.

But, for the last couple of years Sun Storage has been working on a redemptive widget – called the world’s first Open Storage appliance – and Sun claims OSS will change forever how people buy and manage storage.

Yeah, yeah, all the boys say stuff like that – and Sun’s particularly insistent. The EVP of its Systems Group, storage overlord John Fowler claims “It’s the biggest thing to happen in storage in decades.”

The unified storage widgets, the anticipated 7000 “Amber Road” family, part SAN/part NAS, developed by Sun’s so-called FISHworks team, are supposed to radically simplify otherwise complex storage management and deliver breakthrough storage economics.

Starting at $11,000, Sun’s senior director of open storage Graham Lovell says it’s a tenth the price of competitive products.

The Amber Road appliances – there are three of them to begin with – leverage solid-state disks, OpenSolaris and Solaris’ well-regarded Zettabyte File System (ZFS).

Their fully integrated software stacks support Windows and Linux as well as Sun’s house brand of Unix, standard high-speed networking, tape connectivity and the company’s open source MySQL database.

Sun promises two-four times the performance, 10 times faster installation and a fraction of the energy consumption of traditional storage.

It claims it’s changed the model for storage performance.

Sun says traditional proprietary storage products, a $40 billion business, are unnecessarily expensive, hard to install and lack the embedded real-time capabilities to troubleshoot today’s complex storage issues and analyze system performance.

Instead it’s offering the Amber Road 7110 (Iwashi), 7210 (Fugu) and 7410 (Toro), all named for sushi.

FISHworks, sushi, get it? The FISH in FISHworks stands for Fully Integrated Software and Hardware and Sun has developed what it thinks is a drop-dead self-healing management framework that finds and fixes problems before they impact the business. There’s also real-time visibility into what the CPU is doing via a unique interface.

The 2U Iwashi can handle 2TB, the Thumper-style Fugu 44TB and the high-end Toro 288TB now, 576TB with an expected firmware rev in January or February.

Fugu and Toro exploit the Hybrid Storage Pools in ZFS to accelerate and optimize performance while lowering power and cooling requirements.

ZFS was designed to recognize different I/O patterns and organize data to optimize performance. It can utilize four tiers of storage – DRAM, a read-optimized tier, a write-optimized tier and a general storage tier.

Fugu supports write-optimized SSDs; Toro supports read and write-optimized SSDs as well as large processor and memory/caches.

Sun is throwing in free data services such as snap/clone, restore, mirroring, replication, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS, NFS, HTTP/FTP and WebDAV. It can automatically update services and add others.

It says the move changes the model for storage costs.

The appliances are supposed to appeal to everybody with growing amounts of data, which is just about everybody: enterprises, the currently despised financial services, government, mid-market and web-scale start-ups.

Sun can offer them implementation and migration services.

Since Sun is intent on being an open technology company, a policy that many say has hurt its business, it shared widgetry used in Amber Road with open communities such as Opensolaris.org. Now Sun can try to monetize Open Storage. It’s had beta gear out with customers for the last year and is shipping now.

The Open Storage movement boasts 4,500 members and 50-odd storage projects. See www.opensolaris.org/os/storage.