So you want to build a storage server...
You have lots of company. Storage Servers have been around since the days when Sun first put NFS on their workstations. Administrators would load up one workstation with disks and share it with the others. Even today, a large percentage of our "servers" end up as storage servers when deployed.
The acquisition rules for some companies actually favor building a storage server over the purchasing of a separate appliance. The server budget is typically separate from the storage budget for most organizations. Administration is more familiar as well. Administering a storage server is little different from managing any other server, save for the additional commands required to expose the internal storage to a separate host.
So when building a storage server, you want to understand your requirements of course. File or Block protocols? Ethernet or Fibre Channel or even SAS to the hosts? How will you protect the data: snapshot, backup, remote replication? How much CPU power do you need? How much storage space to match that? All of these factor into which server you should buy or repurpose for this deployment and which OS you install. 
Sun does have servers that make a good choice for a storage server. Of course the classic example is the 4500 "Thumper" storage server. Customers have been buying these from us in droves, which is the best proof of the value of this notion. With the OpenSolaris storage stack they have been able to make them into NFS servers, CIFS server and even iSCSI arrays. Now Sun has released software that will take storage servers to the next level: Multi-protocol storage arrays.
The new software, part of the latest build of OpenSolaris, is affectionately called COMSTAR and boy is it the STAR of the storage COMmunication you want to be able to do with a storage server. Fibre Channel, SAS, iSCSI, iSER, OSD, you-name-it, if it's a storage communication protocol, COMSTAR handles it.
Now it may seem silly to think about putting a bunch of SAS/SATA drives in a box with a CPU and then just re-exporting them as SAS targets to hosts. What value does this have? Of course it's what you do in that storage server before you re-export them that make this a storage server and not just an enclosure. You want mirroring, disc scrubbing and automatic failover and repair - load up ZFS. You want remote replication - load up Availability Suite. You want to be able to diagnose bottlenecks and performance issues - load up DTrace. Then export the resulting highly available highly performant virtualized disks.
I think our current stars: ZFS and DTrace, should make room for the new star. Let's hear it for ZFS, DTrace and COMSTAR. Hooray!
Sun does have servers that make a good choice for a storage server. Of course the classic example is the 4500 "Thumper" storage server. Customers have been buying these from us in droves, which is the best proof of the value of this notion. With the OpenSolaris storage stack they have been able to make them into NFS servers, CIFS server and even iSCSI arrays. Now Sun has released software that will take storage servers to the next level: Multi-protocol storage arrays.
The new software, part of the latest build of OpenSolaris, is affectionately called COMSTAR and boy is it the STAR of the storage COMmunication you want to be able to do with a storage server. Fibre Channel, SAS, iSCSI, iSER, OSD, you-name-it, if it's a storage communication protocol, COMSTAR handles it.
Now it may seem silly to think about putting a bunch of SAS/SATA drives in a box with a CPU and then just re-exporting them as SAS targets to hosts. What value does this have? Of course it's what you do in that storage server before you re-export them that make this a storage server and not just an enclosure. You want mirroring, disc scrubbing and automatic failover and repair - load up ZFS. You want remote replication - load up Availability Suite. You want to be able to diagnose bottlenecks and performance issues - load up DTrace. Then export the resulting highly available highly performant virtualized disks.
I think our current stars: ZFS and DTrace, should make room for the new star. Let's hear it for ZFS, DTrace and COMSTAR. Hooray!
