Sun Wants to Be Your Open Storage Vendor
by Mike Gunderloy - Apr. 29, 2008Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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Despite the occasional brush with critics in the open source community, Sun continues to maintain that it will ship all of its software assets as open source (though in some cases the timeframes are not clear). One of the prominent areas where the company is following through on this at the moment is with its storage offerings.
The basic core of Sun's commercial storage offerings is Solaris with ZFS as a file system. And indeed, if you'd like to experiment with this yourself, you can head over to the OpenSolaris Storage Community and start downloading. Recognizing that getting this stuff set up can be on the tough side of "confusing," Sun has also recently added some getting-started information. You can view a 10-minute guide to setting up an OpenSolaris server, or view a more anecdotal account (though the latter cheats by starting with a pile of Sun hardware).
Of course, Sun isn't supporting the open source community purely out of the goodness of its heart. The hope is that at least some folks will see Solaris storage offerings as ready for prime time, and head over to the corporate Sun Open Storage page and spend money, either on hardware or support services.
There are still some barriers to widespread adoption of Sun's storage components in the open source world. Notably, they're licensed under the CDDL, which is not currently compatible with the GPL. But given that Sun has hinted at a GPL dual license, that barrier may fall. Meanwhile, if the prospect of a NAS on your own network is appealing but the cost of commercial offerings is not, Sun Open Storage is worth evaluating.
