News

posted on 29 April 2008 16:34

Sun is attacking the last proprietary bastion of the data centre with an open storage platform for Solaris. It has added developer tools and increased open storage services to help the OpenSolaris storage community.

The open storage platform is built on Solaris, the ZFS file system, and features such as NFS and CIFS which, Sun says, help customers reduce costs by up to 90 percent through the use of open source software on industry-standard (x86) systems.

John Fowler, Sun's Systems Group executive VP, said: "The storage industry is undergoing a radical transformation that parallels what servers went through a decade ago. Solaris, ZFS and the work of the OpenSolaris Storage community deliver rock-solid, enterprise class scalability and value, giving customers a low-cost way to leverage these open architectures without sacrificing quality or reliability."

The OpenSolaris Storage community is an open source community with more than 3,000 members and in excess of 30 active projects. Storage suppliers such as Hitachi Data Systems, Qlogic, Emulex and Brocade have contributed their software to this community.

Sun introduced new developer tools, recipes and how-to guides. The company said that by using them a developer could build an OpenSolaris server in ten minutes with simple commands for ZFS, NFS, CIFS and COMSTAR data management tasks, and for building a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance.

New Sun services can be used 'to speed open storage application development and help customers safely make the transition to an open storage infrastructure.' These apply to both an open storage architectural design from a proprietary system or to a data migration need.

Sun cites customers such as Gracenote, SearchForce, DigiTar, Joyent and others who 'leverage Sun open storage solutions like the Sun Fire x4500 system and Solaris ZFS technology to break through the economic stranglehold of closed systems.'

Jason Williams, CTO of DigiTar, said: "Sun has provided a platform for the democratization of the storage industry. We have found the appropriate level of operating system support we need to run our business through the OpenSolaris storage community, which saves significant time and money. I participate in the community daily and see real business value in the projects that are being created by some of the industry's most important players." 

Other customers include Nexenta, which uses OpenSolaris and ZFS to deliver a NAS software product, and Prominic, a hosting provider delivering storage software appliances.

Grahame Lovell, a senior director at Sun, said Sun is seeing large enterprises, such as an unidentified European telco, using the OpenSolaris storage stack to offer Web 2.0 services because the low cost, less than $1/GB using the Sun open source software, makes the business model possible. Proprietary suppliers offerings were costed at $5/GB or more.

He sees the open source storage software as being the means to radically lower storage costs: "Storage is probably the last bastion of proprietary technology in the datacentre."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}