Please drop a comment here and let us know - we'd love to read it! And you might find yourself quoted right here.

Our good friend Dominic Kay provides another great recipe:

"This article provides a streamlined set of instructions for provisioning an iSCSI array with the Solaris ZFS file system. Because the iscsi.d software used to implement iSCSI targets in the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) is different in both design and syntax from the COMSTAR framework used in the OpenSolaris operating system, this article provides instructions for both environments. These instructions also discuss creating Solaris ZFS file systems on clients/initiators. However, users can choose to use a distributed file system, such as the Network File System (NFS) or Common Internet File System (CIFS), for presenting file-level storage on clients."

New Blueprint: Provisioning with iSCSI and Solaris ZFS in 10 Minutes

"Now, I'll be honest, I think the concept of turning a commodity server into a Fibre Channel array is really nifty and all, but I'm not gonna do it... I don't care. But iSCSI I most certainly do care about. It came to my attention this morning that its already available and been in development for some time, hiding as the iSCSI Extensions for Remote DMA (iSER) Project. This project is not just extentions... it is the COMSTAR iSCSI Port Provider itself, and it includes iSER support. If you've been waiting for the new iSCSI Target Implementation that will utilize COMSTAR, this is it!" 

read on in COMSTAR COMETH: Introduction & iSCSI Target for COMSTAR

...and I'll be there to film you!

"Just wanted to announce that the OpenSolaris CAM project  is now live. This project will ultimately make available the software and technology used in the Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager product. This is the management software for Sun's midrange storage arrays. As a first goal of the project we are looking to build up a collection of community contributed plug-ins to the product that allow it to administer many other storage arrays and
disk systems. We plan on releasing a plug-in toolkit with samples soon. See our project page for more information.

Thanks, Owen Hall"

ZFS saved my data. Right now.  "As you know, I have a server at home that I use for storing all my photos, music, backups and more using the Solaris ZFS filesystem. You could say that I store my life on my server..." Constantin tells us how ZFS saved his data, and his life.

Walter Moriconi informs us that SNIA Unveils Agenda for the 4th Annual Storage Developer Conference. A bunch of us will be there - we look forward to seeing you there, too! Tip: Bookmark Walter's blog for a constant stream of storage news.

Mark Carlson invites you to Get Your Hands on XAM.

Tim Foster reviews Open Solaris news for July.

As the Open Solaris Storage community manager, Jeff Cheeney has his finger on the pulse, and is now doing period roundups of Open Solaris Storage news. So bookmark his blog to stay up to date!

Zhong Wang reports:

The packages and source for FCoE Target has been uploaded on the OpenSolaris FCoE project web page.

Documentation for building, installing and getting started with a FCoE target are also available on the project page.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them on storage-discuss@opensolaris.org.

Ever wanted to get your hands on some really sexy Sun machines? At the Open Solaris Developer Conference in Prague, Jim Walker presented the new Open Solaris test farm - check out the video on his blog to learn how you can get into the sandbox and play!

It's the business model hombre... - "You don't have to look too hard to see examples of businesses that have been impacted as a result of a change in the business model that they served." - Bob Porras

Congrats Nexenta - "Very cool news from my friend Evan Powell at Nexenta. They have signed up Pogo Linux to provide the hardware for their OpenSolaris based sofware appliance." - Jeff Cheeney

Hybrid Storage Pools: The L2ARC - "I've written recently about the hybrid storage pool (HSP), using ZFS to augment the conventional storage stack with flash memory. The resulting system improve performance, cost, density, capacity, power dissipation — pretty much evey axis of importance." - Adam Leventhal

MPxIO now supports Hitachi AMS arrays - "For a long time customers have been asking for mpxio to work with the midrange line of storage arrays from Hitachi. Well, now you can have it with just a couple things..." Torrey

Video: OpenSolaris Tape Enhancements - Scott Tracy spoke to FROSUG.

Blog watching: 20-July - Jeff Cheeney is keeping an eye on Open Solaris and storage news in non-Sun blogs, letting us know what's interesting.

ZFS Workshop at LISA'08 - "We have organized a ZFS Workshop for the USENIX Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA'08) conference in San Diego this November. I hope you can attend." Richard Elling

Solaris iSCSI CHAP and RADIUS Configuration - FAQ - "This document pulls together some well-known and not-so well-known information about how to configure the CHAP and RADIUS security features on Solaris iSCSI. It is necessarily incomplete, since it doesn't go into detail about any of the other aspects of iSCSI configuration." - Peter Cudhea

External storage enclosures in Solaris - "Over the past few years, I've been working on various parts of Solaris platform integration, with an emphasis on disk monitoring. While the majority of my time has been focused on fishworks, I have managed to implement a few more pieces of the original design." - Erick Schrock

Happenings in the OpenSolaris Storage Community - Jeff Cheeney

Distributed Storage Open Source - Celeste - "Celeste is a very interesting set of technologies. It is a distributed object store. That means that when you store an object in a Celeste system, it is split up into chunks that are stored on various machines spread across a network." - Roger Meike

SDSC Gets Set for Storage Explosion - "The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), which has one of the largest SANs in U.S. academia, is overhauling its hulking 28-Pbyte storage system to support some spectacular data growth..." - Sun HPC Watercooler

Just a quick note to let all of you know that the OpenSolaris storage community pages have been translated to Spanish, French, Japanese, Portugues, Russian, and Simplified Chinese.  You can change the language from the left-hand nav bar or the Important Links section.

We hope this will help our storage community reach more of you around the globe.

If you have any questions or comments, send your thoughts to the storage community.  Also, let us know if you'd like to get involved in any future translation efforts.