Taylor's Take on Sun Storage
My storage team and I focus on three of the most important aspects in any industry: customers, competitors and market trends. There is insight to gain and share in this role, so here is our take on Sun and Storage - Taylor Allis
An Easier Storage Platform - OpenSolaris
With data growth, higher energy costs and the emergence of Web 2.0 applications that demand scalable storage at low costs - vendors, end users and market analysts are focusing more on storage architectures. Storage economics need to change - a fundamental change that can only happen at the infrastructure level.
Key to any system is the operating system or platform. OSes obviously hold tremendous importance when evaluating servers - what type of OS and applications are supported? Historically, the underlying OS has not mattered as much in storage. Or at least compatibility and interoperability has mattered more. As long as my storage supports a Mainframe/Unix/Linux/Windows environment, what do I care about the OS?
Storage Platforms
In the open systems market today, the storage OS matters more than ever before. Adding data services at the OS level can change storage economics and increase storage performance and efficiency. Using a common storage platform can save on training and admin costs. Using an open source OS can speed innovation, increase flexibility and save on software costs.
HP is using Windows Storage Server as a storage platform; EMC is leveraging the economics and flexibility of Linux inside its Centera archive product; and NetApp has built its own storage platform - Data ONTAP (originally leveraging FreeBSD open source code).
Sun offers Solaris and OpenSolaris (to see the difference b/w the two, click here). OpenSolaris is the platform for Sun's Open Storage offerings which provides open access to developers (something the storage platforms or implementations mentioned above do not...)
An Easier OpenSolaris
Today Sun announced an easy-to-use OpenSolaris at the 2008 CommunityOne Developer conference. There are several benefits to using OpenSolaris and ZFS as a storage platform - built-in data integrity, snapshot software, volume management and software RAID being a few. But one request the developer community had of OpenSolaris was ease of use - easier to get, install, use, maintain and support. Especially compared to Linux in the open source realm.
Today's announcement is just that - it comes from "Project Indiana" which has been underway for the past year after Ian Murdock joined Sun. Ian is the former Linux Foundation CTO and Debian founder (one of the first Linux distributions.)
So what makes this OpenSolaris distribution easier? An easier to use environment based on GNU-based utilities that's currently leveraged in the GNOME desktop and other applications (See Disk Usage Analyzer screen shot to right). ZFS is also the default root file system now - and as mentioned above, ZFS has some pretty innovative features including a "rollback" option where you can essentially do a "Ctrl-Z" if a software installation or update goes bad. OpenSolaris also includes a new Image Packaging System (IPS) software which enables easier access and downloads to a full suite of additional software. Software updates have also been made easier.
OpenSolaris Support
Of course support is always a large question around anything open source. Sun offers enterprise support for Solaris; support for its commercial storage products built from open storage components; and now Sun will offer two OpenSolaris subscription support offerings beginning May 13. OpenSolaris Production Subscription Support will include 24x7 telephone support, online technical support and bug escalation services. OpenSolaris Essential Subscription Support will include 8x5 business hour online technical support.
OpenSolaris as a Storage Platform
It seems today there are three viable platforms to base a storage platform on that will stand the test of time - Linux, Windows and Solaris. Sun and its community have invested heavily in Solaris as a storage platform - and even some die-hard Linux developers are noticing:
DigiTar is a Linux advocate, but when it came to storage they choose Solaris. In his blog, DigiTar COO/CTO says, "it was storage that brought Solaris into our environment and continues to drive it 
deeper into our services stack. Which begs the question: Why? Isn't DTrace just as cool as ZFS? Haven't Solaris Containers dramatically changed the way we provision and utilize systems? Sure...but storage is what drives our business and it doesn't seem to me that we're alone."
When the Linux developers at Nexenta decided to build "Enterprise Class Storage for Everyone" they choose OpenSolaris as their storage platform. They could only accomplish their storage goals through Solaris.
The fact that OpenSolaris is getting easier to use is good for developers, the community and ultimately to customers. Ease-of-use in addition to enterprise quality, data integrity and data services is a powerful combination....
---- Update ----
We announced that OpenSolaris can be run in a virtual computing environment (aka the cloud)! See Jonathan's blog and the OpenSolaris service offered on Amazon EC2...
Posted at 03:44PM May 05, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[3]
Today's Page Hits: 15
Nice overview of OpenSolaris ... thanks for the coverage, and how it relates to storage.
Posted by Jeff Cheeney on May 07, 2008 at 01:41 PM MDT #
Taylor,
Very nice overview of where we're at with Storage and OpenSolaris.
One issue that's going on with all of the open storage systems is that it's difficult to build highly available systems with the software currently out there.
The tipping point will come when there's an IP failover system to combine with StorageTek replication so that iscsi targets can be picked up by another machine while the primary is down.
Cheers,
Erek Dyskant
Posted by Erek Dyskant on May 10, 2008 at 06:39 PM MDT #
Just noticed how everything storage in the sun line s called StorageTek. I was referring to StorageTek AVS
Posted by Erek Dyskant on May 12, 2008 at 06:24 AM MDT #