We just opened the Honeycomb OpenSolaris community -- a project page and discussion forum focused on addressing the needs of fixed content storage. Honeycomb is an systems approach to managing write-once data that includes object-oriented C and Java interfaces for data-intensive applications and a storage server that scales gracefully and protects the data through self-healing techniques.

Why is fixed content storage interesting? Think YouTube, online photo services, your medical records including xrays, digital books and libraries... all these services do best when the data they need has rich descriptions (metadata) so the applications can find just the data you're looking for.

How much fixed content is there? There are some folks at Berkeley (Hal Varian) who's research let them to estimate that 80% of today's data is fixed content -- it will never be modified. And that the growth rate for fixed content data will reach 90% through 2010 (compared to modified data which is expected to grow at 60%).

If you'd like to learn more, join us at JavaOne this week for more details on Honeycomb and the STK 5800 -- Sun's commercial implementation based on Honeycomb, Solaris 10 and an innovative system design that combines inexpensive disks, load balancing. and the SunFire x64 server platform.

Oh... and I promise to take it easy on the puns for Honeycomb this week as I write more blog entries... it's just soooo tempting.