Sun Opens Up on Open Storage

Sun added more flesh to the bones of its open storage strategy today, bulking up its services and offering a glimpse into its long-term Solaris roadmap.

Sun unveiled its open storage initiative just over a year ago, when it opened up the source code on a number of its NAS technologies, including the ZFS file system and parallel NFS.

Sun also opened up Solaris code related to iSCSI device drivers, QLogic Fibre Channel HBA drivers, and Java implementations of the RPC and NFS protocols, as part of its plan to build storage capabilities into Solaris software running on standard x86 servers.

We have these capabilities that customers can get without having to pay the high cost of storage arrays,” says Graham Lovell, Sun’s senior director for storage servers and appliances. Running Solaris on x86 servers could shave as much as 90 percent off users’ storage costs by removing the need to buy traditional arrays from the likes of EMC or NetApp, according to Lovell.

Using an x86 server for storage purposes nonetheless poses a new set of challenges to users by forcing them to reconfigure their existing hardware to cope with the storage features within Solaris.In an attempt to solve this issue, Sun today launched its SAN Open Storage Evaluation Service, which aims to ease the deployment of Solaris for storage-related work. “We talk to them about the storage environment that they already have and talk to them about their needs,” says Lovell, explaining that Sun helps customers fit Open Storage Solaris into their infrastructure.

The Evaluation Service is available now, although Sun’s Lovell was unable to provide a ballpark figure for how much it costs.

The exec was a little more forthcoming on the Solaris roadmap, hinting that de-dupe features could be added to Solaris, with the technology already featuring prominently in messages and threads on the OpenSolaris Website.

“There is a feature that is becoming available in ZFS around de-dupe,” he says, but he was unable to reveal roadmap specifics. “Given the level of industry interest in de-dupe, obviously, it’s interesting to customers.”

In addition to building de-dupe into ZFS, there is also a developer “wishlist” on the OpenSolaris Website for block-level and tape-level de-dupe, suggesting that these technologies could also surface sometime in the future.At this stage, however, there is something of a question mark about the actual take-up of Solaris Open Storage, with Sun’s Lovell unable to give a specific customer figure. “The people that are trialing it and starting to use it, is probably in the hundreds or thousands right now,” he says.

At least one user, Boise, Idaho-based messaging specialist Digitar, is happy to have put its faith in Solaris, according to a blog entry by its CTO Jason Williams: “What got us using OpenSolaris was Linux’s (circa 2005) unreliable SCSI and storage subsystems,” he writes. “I/Os erroring out on our SAN array would be silently ignored (not retried) by Linux, creating quiet corruption that would require fail-over events.”

The exec goes on to explain how Solaris has changed the way his company designs and uses its storage systems: “It’s enabled us to move almost entirely off of our Fibre-channel SAN,” he explains, adding that Digitar now gets better performance at lower cost by putting its database servers directly on Sun X4500 ‘Thumper’ servers.

Users, of course, can also turn to a growing number of third party vendors to help them exploit the storage-related features of Solaris. One option, for example, is Nexenta Systems, which sells a ZFS-based NAS software appliance.

Sun’s storage business has faltered in recent years, hence the vendor’s desire to use its extensive installed base of servers as a springboard for its storage efforts. This approach appears, at least initially, to be paying off, as evidenced by the vendor’s recent second quarter results, which saw a 5 percent increase in storage sales.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.