Technology company Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the further expansion of its Open Storage portfolio with the introduction of a new line of economical storage arrays, as well as a new high-performance addition to the Sun Fire X4500 'Thumper' family.

According to the company, the new Sun Storage J4000 product line offers a 10x savings over traditional arrays when combined with the company's servers, OpenSolaris operating system and Solaris ZFS. In addition, it offers up to two times the storage density, three times the connectivity, two times the availability and up to 10 times more available capacity than low end storage products.

Three new systems and new connectivity technology were added to the portfolio: Sun Storage J4200 system, with up to 12 drives per tray and up to 46 SAS/SATA drives; Sun Storage J4400 system, with up to four drives per tray, up to 6 SAS ports, up to max 192 3.5" SAS/SATA drives; Sun Storage J4500, a four rack unit with 48 drives per tray, up to four SAS ports and up to 480 3.5" SATA Drives; as well as Sun StorageTek SAS RAID HBA, a host based RAID HBA for Sun servers that allows the J4000 systems to connect directly to servers through one or more high speed interfaces.

The Sun Fire X4540 storage server is the first Open Storage server that integrates industry standard server and storage components under an open architecture and runs Solaris OS and Solaris ZFS. It offers the industry's highest storage density and 30-50% in power and cooling savings at one-half the price versus traditional storage, the company claims.

The new storage server has been certified on the following software: Sun MySQL database, Greenplum datawarehouse, CopperEyes secure data retrieval and Zmanda ZRM for Sun MySql data backup.

The Sun Storage J4000 product line offers a USD3,000 starting price and pricing below USD1/GB for bulk storage applications. The Sun Fire X4500 storage server family starts at USD22,000.