The STK 5800 has open-sourced the code base to three different open source communities:

• The SNIA XAM Initiative (members only)
• OpenSolaris
• The Java Project Royal Jelly

This includes all of the source code as well as the XAM VIM associated with the XAM interface that enables the standard interface for the appliance.  It doesn’t include the GUI or hardware-specific code, but the guts of the box and the client library code are included.

What can you do with this? 

You can run it, modify it, and contemplate the future of storage that is a very different paradigm from what we know today:

• Reliable – Long-term archive, calculated to have a mean time to data loss of over 2 million years!
• Scaleable – Add boxes on the fly without losing performance, in fact you are adding processing nodes, with each additional node sharing the overall task load by design.
• Manageable – No system administration tasks necessary when adding new cells, no provisioning, no zoning, etc.
• Native metadata and query capable – Built-in database allowing on-board query of metadata with user-defined schema, no separate database or compute power required.
• Built on OpenSolaris

Try it, it’s a new play that matches well with the amount of fixed content that is coming our way.

Score and hat trick.