Open Storage
I guess it never really occurred to me to provide an outline of what I see Open Storage as being. Clearly this is an incredible oversight with my new role as "Open Storage Software Community Guy" ;-) So I'll attempt to outline below what I see Open Storage as being.
As you'd expect Jonathan has actually already beaten me to the blogging punch. However, I will endeavour to provide some additional value to the subject.
So what is Open Storage? It's an effort here at Sun to provide storage technology through open source, specifically through OpenSolaris. Essentially:
- Open Standards + Open Source = Open Storage
This area is ripe for disruption. There are many proprietary solutions in this area, but the technology in the OpenSolaris storage stack is compelling. We're seeing examples of the following:
- Explosive data growth
- Increasing CPU power
- Parallelising of CPUs
- Ever increasing data access rates
ZFS is a piece of technology that allows us to take advantage of commodity hardware. It provides the reliable backing store. Among many features it provides guarantees about ondisk consistency (Note it's not the only filesystem that does this). This provides a strong building block for the OpenSolaris Open Storage stack. The stack looks like:
As you can see there are a huge number of components in Open Storage. We provide all sorts of initiators and significant ability to function as a target through COMSTar. There are many different filesystems too. This all provides significant flexibility in using Open Storage to solve the problem the way _you_ want to solve it. You are not constrained by the box that Sun or anyone else sells. If OpenSolaris runs on it you can use it.
It is the ability to provide storage technology on any equipment that OpenSolaris runs that is disruptive. It allows the flexibility to choose the hardware to match the task at hand and scale that as necessary.
So in my view the above comprises what is Open Storage and highlights some of the problems it allows us to solve. Moving ahead I'll dive into more details of some of these components. I'll also blog about random other things to keep everyone on their toes too ;-)
