I coach lacrosse now. Well, assistant-coach lacrosse. I happen to be paired with a really good coach – Dave Devine (all-Ivy, Cornell Defensemen) who has been playing or coaching lacrosse for the better part of the past 40 years. Thank god – he makes up for my ineptness.

My son plays lacrosse. He is different from me: fast, agile, learning quickly. I had to really work at being on the team, I don’t remember anything coming that easily to me.

I did have one advantage: I could see and anticipate the game better than most. I wasn’t very fast, but by anticipating moves and understanding other players' skills and habits, I was able to improve my game. Life-long habit, I still do that today (and feel that I need to). It won me starting special teams (man-down) and 2nd line duties during college.

We played our last game today. Among other things, I noticed that the young players didn’t pick up on the “telegraphing” – when opposing players indicate where they are passing or moving to during the development of a play. When you begin to pick up on the “telegraphs,” your game play rises a couple of notches. This is when you can get a golden steal and run it down for a fast-break and score.

So that is what this article is all about: telegraphing.

Solaris is concentrating on becoming the next storage platform. I’ve hinted about this, and now it’s time to come clean. We’ve seriously invested, and now we’re taking it up to the next level.

Jeff Bonwick talks about Storage running on general-purpose Solaris, and he’s right. We’ve got a feature-rich environment, with more features on the way. With recent additions to Open Solaris, the picture gets even better:

In this post we'll talk about some of the features at a high level. In future posts we'll dive deep to provide more detail.

Management

In terms of the larger management picture, we will be replacing our current CIMOM with something more current and reflective of the open source effort. This in turn provides a framework for vendors to plug in to, to get specific information relevant to the storage platform through SMI-S. We will also continue the effort to support CLI's and API's relevant to storage underlying these providers, as well as creating more GUI's to help users complete their tasks.

Initiators/Clients

We will continue evolving transport stacks on the host/server, using SCSI, SAS, FC, iSCSI and iSER as the primary transports. iSER will be completed in FY08. In addition there are pNFS, CIF’s/NFS, Shared QFS and Honeycomb clients.

Target/Servers

Framework in play here - Currently supporting iSCSI target mode, we are moving to a framework that will allow multiple protocols to operate across the interface. Expect Fibre Channel and iSER to be added to the interface, and that the backend will handle traditional block traffic as well as Objects in FY08.

Configuration Management

iSNS Server is an industry standard which allows automated discovery, management and configuration of iSCSI. This serves a very similar purpose as the fibre channel switch manager. This project has been done in the open and should be ready in early FY08.

File Systems

Wow. Pick your favorite – ZFS, QFS or UFS. Expect to have these choices *in* Solaris.

Data Services

Recently added to Open Solaris, AVS will be integrated into Solaris this month. Offering replication services with a multitude of RPO and RTO settings, this is a powerful addition.

Also included here is the HSM product. Currently supplied by SAM, this will be improved to provide a file-system agnostic interface (Currently called ADM - Automatic Data Migration (the name could change)). These are located at the Target/Server level in the stack.

Backend Storage Systems

This encompasses what you can find on the Solaris servers today – multipathing and support of all protocol stacks needed for your backend disks. Expect more enhancements in MPxIO and open-sourcing of this driver soon.

Whew!! I’d say that’s a double-hat-trick.