Sun Open Storage was an open source

computer data storage Computer data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. The central processing unit (CPU) of a compute ...

platform developed by Sun Microsystems. Sun Open Storage was advertised as avoiding

vendor lock-in In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. The use of open standards and alternat ...

Background

Prior to Open Storage, most storage products were based on customized operating systems running on specialist hardware. In many cases, the specialist hardware was based on old generation hardware, because the customized operating systems were behind in support for current processors and system architectures. During the 2000s, the phenomenal growth in processor performance and processor multithreading left these (often single threaded) storage products with a significant internal processing gap versus current industry standard computers. Open Storage is the concept of building storage products on current industry standard hardware using standard operating systems which have a large enough user and support base to be tracking current hardware (processors, threading, memory, controllers, flash, etc.), avoiding the costs of specialist hardware and custom operating systems, and the performance penalty of not being able to use current generation technologies. Sun's Open Storage products were a combination of their server technologies and software, starting with Solaris 10 6/06 ("Update 2") in June 2006, which included

ZFS ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an ope ...

and the set of protocols to build

NAS Nas (born 1973) is the stage name of American rapper Nasir Jones. Nas, NaS, or NAS may also refer to: Aviation * Nasair, a low-cost airline carrier and subsidiary based in Eritrea * National Air Services, an airline in Saudi Arabia ** Nas Air ( ...

, SAN, and local storage servers. Core features provided by Solaris included the operating environment, the

file-system, the

Network File System Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed. NFS, lik ...

(NFS) and SMB protocol interfaces, Solaris Fault Management Architecture, and other core features. Sun produced the 7000 series Storage Appliance range, based on the Open Storage platform with closed source parts added to create a complete integrated storage appliance. Other companies such as

Greenplum Greenplum is a big data technology based on MPP architecture and the Postgres open source database technology. The technology was created by a company of the same name headquartered in San Mateo, California around 2005. Greenplum was acquired ...

, Nexenta, Delphix, etc. also used the Sun Open Storage platform to produce storage products/appliances with various specialities. Statements by Sun around their Open Storage products indicated that products based on common hardware and open source Solaris, would remove vendor lock-in for customers. In 2008 Sun estimated that open storage products and related services would gain 12 percent of the storage market by 2011. Storage solutions from other vendors are closed systems, in which all the components must come from the vendor. The move to create storage products based on software personalities, running on standard hardware are also part of a broader move within the system and storage industries. Companies including Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp and numerous smaller vendors all have been moving towards storage products based upon standard server hardware and customized software. Following the acquisition of Sun by Oracle in 2010, Oracle stopped using the Open Storage branding and stopped selling the Open Storage hardware products (Storage Servers and JBODs) related to it. Oracle continued manufacturing some of these products only for sale as part of the 7000 series, rebranding them "Unified Storage" instead of "OpenStorage". However, by this time, many other vendors were selling Open Storage hardware. Open Storage branding continued to be used by some of the other companies with Storage products based on Open Storage (ZFS and open sourced Solaris such as

illumos Illumos (stylized as illumos) is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device d ...

), together with an annual Open Storage Summit, although Oracle has not participated.

Technologies

At the storage protocol layer, OpenSolaris supported SCSI,

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...

iSNS In computing, the proposed Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) protocol allows automated discovery, management and configuration of iSCSI and Fibre Channel devices (using iFCP gateways) on a TCP/IP network. Features iSNS provides management s ...

, Fibre Channel, FCoE,

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also use ...

, RDMA, Object storage device, and SAS.

Software

* OpenSolaris, or

Illumos Illumos (stylized as illumos) is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device d ...

, or FreeBSD, or

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

using ZFS on Linux *

, NFS, and SMB *

NexentaStor NexentaStor is an OpenSolaris or more recently Illumos distribution optimized for virtualization, storage area networks, network-attached storage, and iSCSI or Fibre Channel applications employing the ZFS file system. Like OpenSolaris, NexentaSt ...

FreeNAS TrueNAS is the branding for a range of free and open-source network-attached storage (NAS) operating systems produced by iXsystems, and based on FreeBSD and Linux, using the OpenZFS file system. It is licensed under the terms of the BSD Li ...

SmartOS SmartOS is a free and open-source SVR4 hypervisor based on the UNIX operating system that combines OpenSolaris technology with Linux's KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributed to the illumos project. It features several technologies: C ...

, OmniOS

Hardware platforms

Sun Fire X4500 The Sun Fire X4500 data server (code named Thumper) integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006 and is part of the Sun Fire server line from Sun Microsystems. In July 2008, Sun announced the X4540 model (code-named ...

* Sun Storage J4500 Array * Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage

References

External links

Sun Open Storage

OpenSolaris Storage Projects

The Open Storage Revolution
(presentation by Jeff Bonwick) {{Sun Microsystems Computer storage devices