Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

What is Open Storage? White Paper

Our Open Storage announcement drummed up interest in the industry - and for good reason...

• Tony Pearson at IBM related Open Storage to "Simply Dinners" - which is not a bad analogy.  I was thinking of the analogy of going to Home Depot or Lowe's vs. hiring a contractor for your house project - but Simply Dinners will do.  
  
• Marc Farley at Dell asked if Sun was giving up or changing the game?  I can assure you that we aren't giving up (storage is a pretty big market after all), but he nails it with his changing the game remarks - that's exactly what we are trying to do. 
  
• Lastly, EMC blogger Chuck Hollis aired his thoughts on Do-It-Yourself Storage, and we had a good discussion in the comments I thought.  (Until Chuck said I had turned from simply disagreeing to becoming disagreeable when I answered his questions on Open Storage - that ended that discussion!  Oh well, I guess he was trying to be rhetorical...) 

With that said - there is still a lot more to discuss about Open Storage.   We will have announcements upcoming, and we will also be publishing some White Papers on the subject. 

This first one is appropriately titled, What is Open Storage?  And it can be downloaded here:

• What is Open Storage? White Paper

I'll post the CliffsNotes below.  I would also like to thank Bruce Norikane, our Sr. Analyst, for his help in writing these papers - his intellect on storage infrastructures, past and present, is astounding.  I'd like to also thank or intelligence manager, Chris Ilg, for his forecasting work; as well as Graham Lovell, Jason Schaffer and our army of developers/engineers for their direction and edits (and leading the way to Open Storage...)

What is Open Storage?   (The short version)
Open Storage refers to open systems storage products based on industry-standard hardware and open source software.  Also, in an open storage architecture, customers can select the best hardware and software components for their individual needs.  By contrast, almost all modern disk arrays and NAS storage offerings are closed systems.

To see the evolution of disk architectures and benefits to Open Storage, see the blog post, "Sun is on to something"

Open Storage Versus Traditional Storage
The following chart compares vendor products, first ship dates, and storage system components. Red items are system components that are closed, proprietary, and available through a single vendor. Yellow items are built from industry-standard components yet sold as part of a closed, proprietary system. Green items are truly open components. They are industry-standard or open-source software, giving customers choice over how their systems are built.

Of significance, since 1992, storage systems have started to utilize open-source, commodity, or industry-standard technologies.  FreeBSD and Linux are used in several systems from vendors such as IBM, EMC, NetApp, and HP.  However, these open technologies are deployed in a closed-system approach.

Storage software is the last major storage infrastructure software to become open source, and Sun’s OpenSolaris Storage community has been leading the change.

Sun Open Storage Value Proposition 
The market shift to open storage systems and Sun’s open storage approach offer four distinct advantages:

1. A global development community working to make storage more innovative, functional and affordable
   
2. Breakthrough economics that can save storage users up to 90% over closed, proprietary storage
3. Enterprise-class quality storage systems that are reliable and offer some of the highest data integrity in the industry
4. The ability to easily and dynamically scale IT infrastructures to meet changing business needs
   

Sun Open Storage Offerings.

• Sun Open Storage Servers: The Sun Fire X4500 server leverages industry-standard hardware and software. It is a Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based server with 48 hot-swappable SATA drives in a single 4 U chassis that can achieve 48 TB of raw capacity with 1 TB SATA drives.
• Sun Open Storage Archive: The Sun StorageTek 5800 system also leverages industry standard components. It is the first integrated, fixed content archiving system built using open-source software.  In a recent InfoWorld product review, it scored perfect 10s in reliability and scalability.
• Sun Open Storage HPC: The Sun Constellation System builds on cost-effective, off-the-shelf components
  and state-of-the-art technologies to deliver an open, petascale architecture capable of up to 1.7 petaFLOPS of
  computing power.
• Lustre file system: Lustre is Sun’s open-source shared disk file system that is generally used for largescale
  cluster computing. The Lustre file system is currently used in 15% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, and six of the top 10 supercomputers.
  
• Sun Open Storage Software: OpenSolaris is the cornerstone of Sun Open Storage offerings and provides a solid foundation as an open storage platform.  It includes:
• Solaris ZFS: ZFS can address 256 quadrillion zettabytes of storage and handle a maximum
  file size of 16 exabytes.
• Solaris DTrace: DTrace enables users to ask arbitrary diagnostic questions of the storage subsystem
• Solaris Fault Management Architecture: Solaris Fault Management Architecture provides automatic monitoring and diagnosis of I/O subsystems and hardware faults
• Sun StorageTek Availability Suite: Sun AVS delivers open-source remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy applications as well as a collection of supporting software and utilities.

Posted at 01:00PM May 15, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[3]