Sun Open Storage was an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

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 comput ...

platform developed by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

. 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 alternativ ...

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 and the set of protocols to build NAS, SAN, and local storage servers. Core features provided by Solaris included the operating environment, the ZFS 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, li ...

(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,

Nexenta Nexenta by DDN, Inc., is a subsidiary of DataDirect Networks that markets computer software for data storage and backup, headquartered in San Jose, California. Nexenta develops the products NexentaStor, NexentaCloud, NexentaFusion, and NexentaEd ...

, 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 An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The wor ...

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

Technologies

At the storage protocol layer,

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around t ...

supported

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

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/I ...

, iSNS,

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data c ...

, 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 us ...

, RDMA,

Object storage device Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an a ...

, and

SAS SAS or Sas may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''SAS'' (novel series), a French book series by Gérard de Villiers * ''Shimmer and Shine'', an American animated children's television series * Southern All Stars, a Japanese rock ba ...

Software

, or Illumos, or

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

, 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, which i ...

using

ZFS on Linux OpenZFS is a free and open-source storage platform licensed under CDDL that encompasses the functionality of traditional filesystems and logical volume manager. It includes protection against data corruption, support for high storage capaci ...

* ZFS, NFS, and SMB * NexentaStor,

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 BS ...

, SmartOS, OmniOS

Hardware platforms

* Sun Fire X4500 * 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 Jeff Bonwick invented and led development of the ZFS file system, which was used in Oracle Corporation's ZFS storage products as well as startups including Nexenta, Delphix, Joyent, and Datto, Inc. Bonwick is also the inventor of slab allocation, ...

) {{Sun Microsystems Computer storage devices