Open Storage combines open source software with industry standard hardware to change the way the world stores, accesses, and manages its data. In essence it takes the storage brains away from expensive, proprietory controller solutions and implements it using an embedded server using open standards. RAID that gives resilience through multiple failues, disk snapshots and remote replication are a few of the features that can be built with only commodity hardware.

What is Open Storage?

As a general term, open storage refers to storage systems built with an open architecture using industry-standard hardware and open-source software. In an open architecture, customers can select the best hardware and software components to meet their requirements. For example, a customer who needs network file services can use an open storage filer built from a standard x86 server, disk drives, and OpenSolaris technology at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary NAS appliance.

Almost all modern disk arrays and NAS are closed systems. All the components of a closed system must come from the vendor. Customers are locked into buying disk drives, controllers, and proprietary software features from a single vendor at premium prices and typically cannot add their own drives or software to improve functionality or reduce the cost of the closed system. For more than 20 years, storage system vendors have utilized more and more standard components in their products but have not passed along savings to their customers, because the products have remained closed and proprietary. Standard CPUs, memory, and disk drives are used by most storage vendors, but closed, proprietary storage systems can cost up to five times the market price for standard components such as disk drives.

During this decade, open-source software has radically altered the computing landscape. Many new storage systems use Linux or OpenSolaris as their base operating system. Vendors have turned open source into proprietary systems by augmenting basic Linux with their own storage-specific features such as snapshots, remote replication, and volume management. Ironically, most of these systems come to market as closed systems, and customers are not able to add software, substitute disk drives, or modify the vendor’s software. Despite the rise of open systems and open source, closed architectures continue to dominate the storage market.

Sun Open Storage systems combine open architecture with sophisticated open-source storage software, freeing storage customers from proprietary lock-in. Sun has released a significant volume of storage software to many communities through open-source licensing, in order to enrich their code bases. Sun OpenSolaris open-source contributions include the world’s best file system, Solaris ZFS, and two archive systems, the Sun StorageTekTM Archive Manager and Sun StorageTekTM 5800 system. In addition, the Sun StorageTekTM Availability Suite offers robust volume snapshot and remote replication features. NFS and CIFS servers providing NAS server functionality have also been open sourced. Lastly, the innovative COMSTAR software framework adds a state-of-the-art SCSI target platform that uniquely separates the SCSI protocol handling from the transport protocols (such as FC, iSCSI, SAS, and tape). This facilitates higher performance and flexibility for a wide range of storage devices. These and the many other features in OpenSolaris technology enable end
users, OEMs, and developers to build innovative and inexpensive storage systems with very little software development. By participating in the OpenSolaris project, developers can tap the expertise of world-class software engineers.

Sun Open Storage Software
OpenSolaris technology: OpenSolaris technology is the cornerstone of Sun Open Storage offerings and provides a solid foundation as an open storage platform. The origin of OpenSolaris technology, the Solaris OS, has been in continuous production since September 4, 1991. OpenSolaris technology offers the most complete open-source storage software stack in the industry. Below is a list of current and planned offerings:

• At the storage protocol layer, OpenSolaris technology provides SCSI, iSCSI, iSNS, FC, FCoE, InfiniBand software, RDMA, OSD, SES, and SAS
• At the storage presentation layer, OpenSolaris technology offers Solaris ZFS, UFS, SVM, NFS, Parallel NFS, CIFS, MPxIO, Shared QFS, FUSE, and the Sun StorageTek 5800 system
• At the storage application layer, OpenSolaris technology offers MySQLTM software, Postgres, BerkeleyDB, AVS, SAM-FS, Amanda, and Filebench

OpenSolaris technology provides an end-to-end storage platform and includes these
essential features:

Solaris ZFS
Another cornerstone of Sun’s open storage platform is the Solaris ZFS file system. Solaris ZFS can address 256 quadrillion zettabytes of storage and handle a maximum file size of 16 exabytes. Solaris ZFS deploys several storage services including snapshots, point-in-time-copy, volume management, administration, and data integrity features such as copy-on-write and RAID. Vendors of closed storage appliances typically charge customers extra software licensing fees for data management services such as administration, replication,and volume management. The Solaris OS with Solaris ZFS moves this functionality to the operating system, simplifying storage management and eliminating layers in the storage stack. In doing this, Solaris ZFS changes the economics of storage. A closed
and expensive storage system can now be replaced by a storage server running Solaris ZFS, or a server running Solaris ZFS attached to JBOD. Solaris ZFS recently won InfoWorld’s 2008 Technology of the Year award for best file system. In the InfoWorld evaluation, the reviewer stated, “Soon after I started working with [Solaris] ZFS (Zettabyte File System), one thing became clear: The file system of the next 10 years will either be [Solaris] ZFS or something extremely similar.”

Solaris DTrace
Solaris DTrace provides an advanced tracing framework and language that enables users to ask arbitrary diagnostic questions of the storage subsystem, such as “Which user is generating which I/O load?” and “Is the storage subsystem data block size optimized for the application that is using it?” These queries place minimal load on the system and can be used to resolve support issues and increase system efficiency with very little analytical effort.

Solaris Fault Management Architecture
Solaris Fault Management Architecture provides automatic monitoring and diagnosis of I/O subsystems and hardware faults and facilitates a simpler and more effective end-to-end experience for system administrators, reducing cost of ownership. This is achieved by isolating and disabling faulty components and then continuing the provision of service through reconfiguration of redundant paths to data, even before an administrator knows there is a problem. The Solaris OS’ reconfiguration agents are integrated with other Solaris OS features such as Solaris Zones and Solaris Resource Manager, which provide a consistent administrative experience and are transparent to applications.

Sun StorageTek Availability Suite
Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software delivers open-source remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy applications as well as a collection of supporting software and utilities. The remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy software enable volumes and/or their snapshots to be replicated between physically separated servers. Replicated volumes can be used for tape and disk backup, off-host data processing, disaster recovery solutions, content distribution, and other volume-based processing tasks.

Lustre file system
Lustre is Sun’s open-source shared disk file system that is generally used for large-scale cluster computing. The Lustre file system is currently used in 15 percent of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, and six of the top 10 supercomputers. Lustre currently supports tens of thousands of nodes, petabytes of data, and billions of files. Development is underway to support one million nodes and trillions of files.