Sun just finished open sourcing our current Solaris storage software stack by making available the source code of the next release of SAM-FS and Shared QFS on opensolaris.org. We had promised our boss (3rd removed) a little over a year ago that we would open source all of our Solaris storage software by the end of June 2008. We did it! With just over three months to spare.

But back to SAM and Shared QFS...

SAM is a heirarchical storage (HSM) and archive manager which provides automated policy management for users to easily administer large volumes of data stored across different tiers of storage from fast expensive disk to commodity storage devices to inexpensive, eco-friendly tape.

QFS is a Solaris-based cluster file system whose performance is ideally suited for data streaming and transactional applications.

The SAM and QFS release under development is aimed at folks with large storage environments who need hundreds or thousands of clients accessing the Shared QFS data servers. To reach this magnitude of scalability, Shared QFS has been extended to use an object model for the data servers which we discussed recently at FAST. Users now choose between the Shared QFS block or object file systems depending on their scalability requirements.

But wait... there's more. SAM which routinely manages petabytes of data has also been updated to improve performance for the archive, catalog and scheduler components.

Lots of thanks are due to the SAM-QFS team. But I'd like to start with Ted who managed the entire open source process (as well as the engineers) and especially Harriet who first made SAM available in 1992 followed by Shared QFS in 2002.

Want to read more? Check out these blogs -- Margaret, Umang and Josh.