Sun Microsystems Announces OpenSolaris as Industry's Most Comprehensive Multi-Vendor Storage Operating System

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced it is donating storage technologies for storage developers within the OpenSolaris community. This will enable community members to combine OpenSolaris with hardware from any source to create compelling storage solutions at a fraction of the price of traditional proprietary storage vendors. This combination of open source and commodity hardware heralds a new stage in the storage industry.


Sun is taking the lead in creating a community-driven software development platform that speeds time-to-market for storage application development and which better addresses customers' ever-evolving data management and archiving needs. Sun is donating the source code to the Storage community at http://opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/ which will feature email forums, design documents and open source code.



"Just as free and open source code has changed the way server and desktop operating systems are developed, evaluated and deployed, today marks a big step in repeating this model for storage software technology," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems. "Sun is taking the lead in changing the market by enabling the creation of compelling low-cost storage solutions via the free and open availability of open source software, including Solaris, on commodity hardware from a wide-range of vendors including HP, Dell, IBM, and Sun."



Today Sun also announced the previously Sun-only flexible administration features of Solaris ZFS will be donated to OpenSolaris. ZFS is a dynamic file system which simplifies management and adds functionality. The features donated include:

• ZFS Clone Promotion feature, which allows storage users to turn a clone back into the active file system;


• Recursive Snapshots feature, which automatically creates snapshots for all descendent file systems.


• Double Parity RAIDZ, a data protection enhancement to that provides storage users with enough protection so that no data will
  be lost if up to two devices fail


• Hot Spares for ZFS Storage Pool Devices, data protection disks that can replace failed or faulted devices, eliminating downtime
  after disk failure.

Sun and its partners are also introducing the following storage technologies into the OpenSolaris Storage community:

• Point-in-Time Copy data service and Remote Mirror data service - allows volumes and their snapshots to be replicated between physically different servers. Includes filter-driver framework and utilities. This is the first commercial version of replication software that has been open sourced;


• NFS v4.1 (also known as parallel NFS) -- provides scalable parallel access to files distributed among multiple servers;


• YANFS (formerly known as WebNFS) - Java implementation of the client side of the XDR, RPC, NFSv2, and NFSv3 protocols;


• iSCSI device drivers -- provides both the initiator and target support for the IETF iSCSI protocol which allows the use of the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP networks;


• OSD device drivers and related software -- provides both initiator and target support for storage devices that adhere to the SCSI Object-Based Storage Device (OSD) command protocol;


• QLogic Fibre Channel HBA driver – The QLogic QLC driver enables booting from internal and external Fibre Channel devices and are now a part of OpenSolaris, making Sun’s stack of drivers which facilitate I/O activity to host bus adapters open from top to bottom – a first in the world of open storage;

OpenSolaris already provides an extensive array of storage software including a native CIFS client, UFS, Solaris Volume Manager, Traffic Manager (multipathing I/O support), a complete Fibre Channel framework with drivers, as well as traditional target drivers. Please see http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/ for the entire list. Sun also has plans to open source the following technologies in the coming months: Sun StorageTek QFS shared file system, Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager, Sun StorageTek 5800 client interfaces and simulator/server and other storage-related technologies.



OpenSolaris Launches The First Open Source Storage Development Community
The new Storage community on OpenSolaris.org will help give developers a quicker way to deploy data-intensive applications. The community includes developers adding data management functionality and customizing the storage stack for new applications and platforms; system administrators implementing Solaris technology in data centers; educators and students researching data management in universities; and new users exploring the technology and discovering that OpenSolaris offers new opportunities. Application developers that adopt OpenSolaris as a storage platform can now utilize and enhance their existing data services and have the means to develop their own data services.



Further details on Sun's Storage family can be found at http://www.sun.com/storage.