OpenSolaris Storage - no more white shoes

Traditions - an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior.

There are all kinds of traditions in families, cultures, religions and even companies. Some of my personal traditions range from making my grandmother's cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, saying bed time prayers with my son, and writing monthly status reports. One odd tradition in the US is that women (and I guess men too) can not wear white shoes between the Labor Day Holiday and Memorial Day.  As I did a bit of research for this post I found that I'm not supposed to wear sandals after Labor Day either! Bagh ... For those who know me sandals or flip-flops are part of my attire most of the year. I have never understood the tradition of no white after Labor Day, but if guess there are lots of people who need rules and need traditions to survive in the fashion world. Just as it seems people have traditions in their personal worlds, so do they in the corporate/ work worlds. Some times these traditions are called best practices and other are just word of mouth policies.

Traditions, as great as they are, only go so far. They keep us connected to the past, but don't really enable a different future ... what about breaking with tradition, not being the new monkey, looking for new ways to do things ... I'm here to talk about the folks who are not afraid to break from tradition, the people who are willing to take a chance on something different. As I worked up the monthly report for the storage community It hit me that there are many folks who are using OpenSolaris at the heart of their storage environment or who are using new technologies to get beyond the limits of their traditions. There are customers like Joyent who were one of the first companies to put ZFS into production (before it was officially supported!). Guys like Nexenta who are creating new products with OpenSolaris ... or what about greenBytes? (I'm not sure what they guys are up to, but ZFS+ and a the tag line "Expect some magic on 9/15" makes me wonder...) There are also folks like OurStage and Liveammo that are putting the storage technologies of OpenSolaris into their production environment. ... all of these examples breaking the traditional image of storage ... what are your examples of breaking with tradition? If you will be in Santa Clara, CA on Sept 21,2008 come by the OpenSolaris Storage Summit and hear from some some of the people changing the storage industry.

So what's next? Have you checked out the latest project "Hadoop Live CD at OpenSolaris.org"? or what about Project Celeste? These are some great examples of thinking about storing and retrieving "things" differently. I'm sure these project teams would love for you to stop by their project pages, take a look around and then start asking questions. Even better maybe you can jump in and help out.

With all this build up ... I will present the OpenSolaris Storage Community monthly report for August 2008.

• The FUSE project in cooperation with the ntfs-3 community have version NTFS-3g-1.2717 working with FUSE!
• The OpenSolaris CAM project is now live. (12-Aug)
• According to Aaron Dailey's blog NPIV (N Port ID Virtualization) for OpenSolaris is now delivered.
• Robert Gordon announced the putback of NFS/ RDMA. This is a milestone delivery of a project developed by students at the Univ of Ohio in conjugation with engineers at Sun. (21-Aug)
• Zhong Wang announced the availability of the FCoE (Fibre Chanel over Ethernet) initiator and target. This is a sweet combination of COMSTAR and the ability to use Fibre Chanel protocol with out special hardware! (29-Aug)

The community also saw continued growth in message traffic (year over year) and in page views. Both of these stats showed monthly declines which seems to map to a general trend. I'll close this post with one final invitation to the OpenSolaris Storage Summit. Todate we have over 40 registered atendees, talks from Ben Rockwood, Mike Shapiro, Jeff Bonwick, and Bill Moore. Our attendee list represents a broad spectrum of OpenSolaris users and the after party looks to be a great time. If you happen to be in Santa Clara, CA on September 21, 2008 plan to stop by and enjoy the FREE event.

Posted by Jeff Cheeney [Open Source Storage] ( September 04, 2008 02:46 PM ) Permalink