Despite all the gloom about Sun's ailing business, there's little doubt that the company has the capacity to pump out good ideas and great hardware. Its newly introduced Amber Road storage systems probably won't dig it out of the hole it's in by itself, but could be one rung on the ladder out.

If there's one thing Sun has always done well, it's hardware, and with Unified Storage it has pulled together a package that consists of its inimitable hardware plus OpenSolaris and ZFS. Among the cool things you can do: pool different media types (solid state disks and conventional hard drives); create persistent read-only point-in-time snapshots of media; and tons more. Things like this have been behind why ZFS has long been touted as the big reason to use Solaris.

So who is Sun planning to sell stuff like this to? Given the prices it is charging (five figures and up) for these boxes, it's not for anything less than enterprise use -- or for helping build the cloud-computing infrastructures that are probably going to be a fairly big chunk of enterprise computing in the years to come. The open source side of the whole thing means folks who need to build their own high-performance or specific-scenario extensions on top of it would be able to do that all the more easily -- provided their attention hasn't already been drawn away by commodity Linux, though.

Ironically, it's stuff like Amber Road that would make Sun a smart acquisition for Oracle, one of several names being floated as a buyer for the company. Oracle's own work with next-generation file systems for Linux (BTRFS), with Linux itself, and with large-scale software in general, would pair up nicely with Sun's hardware. Here's hoping Sun can make this into part of their rejuvenation plan instead the first stages of a fire sale.

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/syegulalp