A handful of Sun folks attended FAST (USENIX File and Storage Technologies) last week along with around 450 other attendees -- the largest FAST to date. This event focuses on research related to file and storage technologies.

It was great talking to various university folks... and I was thrilled to hear that several are evaluating a move to OpenSolaris. There are several new technologies in OpenSolaris that fit nicely into university curriculum (ZFS, DTrace, Fault Management, Service Management Facility, pNFS, Automatic Data Migration, Crossbow, COMSTAR) as well as providing a resilient, scalable research platform for various data and storage management topics.

Here are the  Sun topics from FAST...

Sun's Works in Progress
- Filebench, Drew Wilson

Sun's Poster Sessions
- Shared QFS Object-Based Storage File System  Abstract
Todd Pisek, Sun Microsystems
- N_Port ID Virtualization for Solaris/Xen  Abstract
Aaron Dailey, Sun China Engineering and Research Institute
- The New and Improved FileBench  Abstract
   Andrew Wilson, Sun Microsystems

Sun BOF
- OpenSolaris Storage, Jeff Cheeney

See you next year at FAST!