Last week I spoke on Managing Scalable Storage Environments with Solaris at the Sun Forum 2.0 storage customer conference. It was great to see our storage customers again and this year we also went live with streaming video for those customers who could not travel.

Many of our Forum customers have mainframes and we ended up chatting about OpenSolaris running on the z-series mainframes. Sine Nomine Associates has recently released a version of OpenSolaris for System z. You can also get more details at the opensolaris project page.

Bringing OpenSolaris Storage capabilities to the mainframe is an interesting value proposition. Not quite what we originally had in mind when we launched the Open Storage initiative here at Sun :^) but certainly in the spirit of using open source software to make the most of your existing hardware in tough economic times.

Several of our OpenSolaris features have mainframe inspiration like fault management architecture (FMA) and hierarchical storage management with SAM , ADM and MMS (for cost effective tiered storage environments) so perhaps OpenSolaris on System z is not so surprising. And bringing innovative storage technologies like ZFS to the mainframe environment is a great opportunity to get feedback from folks who really know how to maximize use of storage resources.

Check out Jeff Savit's blog and comments on his experience with OpenSolaris on System z.