Sun Open Storage

Sun Microsystems is going to change the landscape of storage from proprietary to open standard and they call it Sun Open Storage. As mentioned in the OpenSolaris's Storage Community web page:

The importance of OpenSolaris as a storage operating system has really emerged with the new and updated storage features, such as ZFS, NFS, pNFS, Shared QFS, Storage Archive Manager, Honeycomb fixed content management, Availability Suite, iSCSI, etc. OpenSolaris is now being embedded in storage appliances or used on hybrid server/storage devices to manage very large collections of data.

A White Paper: What is Open Storage describes the concept, cost saving and value proposition of having open standard for the storage software stack (Click here to view image from original site). Sun claims that open storage architecture offers 90 percent less $/GB storage compared to a closed storage architecture.

With the advance features in hardware and softwware like: OpenSolaris, ZFS, Common Internet File System (CIFS) server, other storage projects and Sun Fire X4500 (a.k.a Thumper), it is not hard to envisage how all these pieces fit together to realise an open standard storage.

There is another article in Sun Developers Network describing how to Set Up an OpenSolaris Storage Server in 10 Minutes or Less. BTW, a new startup company, Nexenta Systems, has been developing open source based storage software solutions.

Also, a video featuring Sun's Andy Bechtolsheim, Matt Baier, and Jeff Bonwick join John Fowler to discuss advancements in Open Storage.