The way you manage and use your NAS storage is about to change forever. Today Sun will be announcing (15:30 PT) the new Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems (aka Amber Road) that will make setting up and managing terabytes of storage super quick, super simple and incredibly affordable.

You'll be able to go from powered off to offering hundreds of terabytes of storage over CIFS, NFS and iSCSI in literally minutes thanks to ZFS. And if you encounter any performance problems, you can use the built in graphical analytical tool to drill right down to find the cause (courtesy of DTrace). And when I say drill right down, I mean right down to the file being accessed by the client and the physical disk it's being stored on, all within the beautiful GUI. Imagine doing that with your NetApp kit. Oh, and did I mention, unlike NetApp, you don't pay more for each of the functionalities: it's all included and enabled out the box.

Be sure to catch the live announcement at 15:30 PT today, but until then, feast your eyes on the product page and be sure to take the Sun Unified Storage Simulator for a spin. This has got to be the sexiest and most intuitive GUI BUI I've ever seen, let alone from Sun (who's notorious for crap GUIs).

I'm really excited about this product and really hope it has the impact Sun is hoping for.

Update: Mike Shapiro (one of the guys behind these new boxes) has a great write up of the features and functionality you can expect from these bad boys.