Sun plans storage technology donation to open source

 

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By Rene Millman

Posted on 11 Apr 2007 at 15:56

Sun has announced plans to donate parts of its storage software and hardware technology to the open-source community. The move is seen as a bid to increase the number of storage systems based on the Solaris operating system.

Among the donated technologies are previously Sun-only administration features of Solaris ZFS, which will be given over to the OpenSolaris open source community.

It will also hand over the ZFS Clone Promotion feature, which allows storage users to turn a clone back into the active file system; the Recursive Snapshots feature, which automatically creates snapshots for all descendent file systems; Double Parity RAIDZ, a data protection enhancement to that provides storage users with protection so that no data will be lost if up to two devices fail and Hot Spares for ZFS Storage Pool Devices technology.

Sun and its partners will also hand over Point-in-Time Copy data service and Remote Mirror data service. It is also donating parallel NFS and YANFS (formerly known as WebNFS).

A number of device drivers are making their way to the open-source effort, including iSCSI device drivers; OSD device drivers and related software, provides both initiator and target support for storage devices that adhere to the SCSI Object-Based Storage Device (OSD) command protocol and the Logic Fibre Channel HBA driver.

'Just as free and open source code has changed the way server and desktop operating systems are developed, evaluated and deployed, today marks a big step in repeating this model for storage software technology,' said Rich Green, executive vice president of Software at Sun Microsystems.

Green said that the company is 'taking the lead in changing the market by enabling the creation of compelling low-cost storage solutions via the free and open availability of open source software, including Solaris, on commodity hardware from a wide-range of vendors including HP, Dell, IBM, and Sun.'

The company is also planning to release more technology to the open-source community in the coming months including Sun StorageTek QFS shared file system, Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager and Sun StorageTek 5800 client interfaces.