The thing about SAM and Q is that their attributes have been required for the medical, military, and oil&gas industries for over a decade now, which is why they are so widely deployed in those market sectors. But the need to store and retrieve large volumes of data quickly and cost-effectively is no longer a requirement limited to those markets. Heck I've got a terabyte of data at home - think about what's going on in media & entertainment, manufacturing, financial services, education...

SAM-QFS was originally developed by LSC Inc, which was purchased by Sun in 2001. I had the opportunity to work closely with the SAM-Q team when they first joined Sun: back then there was Harriet (who has had a fascinating career in high tech), the Matthews brothers and the Intern, Bob, Ted, Tom, Harold, John, Margaret, Clay, Robert, Dave, ... who did I forget? I have lots of crazy Eagan Minnesota memories with the team - like the last slot in the soda machine, the oven at the side of the road, the bratwurst barbeques. The first time I went to Minnesota to meet with them - as I was pulling out of the airport -the Hertz guy said to me "Ya ready for the snow?" Two feet by the morning! Boy was it cold, and that was in the spring! And I have warmer memories of meeting with their customers - like Robert Cecil, PhD, Cleveland Clinic’s network director. Dr Bob gave us a great tour through radiology where SAM-Q was being used to show that a tumor was shrinking, through surgery where SAM-Q provides patient data right in the operating room, and through the data center with huge tape libraries, where SAM-Q was helping to increase the quality of patient care while decreasing costs. And I remember Dr Bob speaking on a panel at a storage conference - when asked about the importance of data availability, he quietly stated that access to data is the difference between life and death. No one can express the need for data availability and integrity better than Dr Bob.

Open sourcing SAM-Q is a key step for Sun and the developer community. It's now easy for people facing large data management challenges to try something that has worked for years in large scale, mission-critical deployments. And in case you're wondering how a business can make money while making such a key asset freely availably, remember that SAM-Q runs on servers, needs to be supported in product environments, stores data on disk and tape, ...