We've been talking a lot lately about Open Storage... and how open source software and industry standard hardware can dramatically lower the cost of storage.

The latest entry in this Open Storage category is a cool project that just became available with the latest OpenSolaris community build -- COMSTAR, the Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target. Although it's full name sounds a little geeky COMSTAR lets you take a spare x86 server running OpenSolaris and create a cheap general purpose storage array. An Open Storage array.

Here's a little history on COMSTAR...

The prototype started in the spring of 2007 with the OpenSolaris project page showing up in July 2007.  Sumit led the implementation and John (shown here talking about iSCSI management) worked on the management aspects of the project.

While the framework has been developed by Sun engineers the port providers are being contributed by QLogic, Emulex and LSI. Here's a good illustration of the COMSTAR architecture.

Here are some good COMSTAR resources to help you get started...

Videos

• Peter Buckingham speaks at CommunityOne on "COMSTAR Solaris-Based Storage Device Multiprotocol Storage Server"
• Zhong Wang speaks at Storage Networking World on "COMSTAR: Solaris-Based Storage Device" and describes the fundamentals of a COMSTAR FCoE provider.
• Zhong, Reed & Jeff talking COMSTAR on the Storage Networking World show floor
• Sumit on COMSTAR at SNIA Storage Developer Conference 2007

Documentation

• COMSTAR Users Guide
• Release notes

We'd love to hear about your COMSTAR experiences... join the conversation on our OpenSolaris Storage discussion alias.