Sun Turns Object Storage Over to OpenSolaris

[ Thanks to Paul Shread for this link. ]

"Slow Uptake for Object Storage
OSD has long been viewed as a significant move beyond the communication, scalability and security limits of block and SCSI technology, but has yet to catch on beyond high-performance storage environments.

"Brent Welch, director of architecture at Panasas, which has been a pioneer in both OSD and pNFS development, noted that "introducing new storage standards is a slow process. Even something like iSCSI that was only a slight variation on an existing standard took a long time. OSD is a fairly radical standard by comparison, and we expect widespread adoption to take time."

"Panasas has used OSD and pNFS to develop a highly scalable parallel file system. "Sun doesn't have products in this area, and in fact it acquired Lustre (CFS), which is also an object-based file system," said Welch. "However, Lustre doesn't use the standard OSD interface, but an 'object-like' interface of its own design."

"Panasas has also invested in open source Linux implementations of OSD targets and initiators, and a freestanding file system called exofs that runs over OSD. "Our goal is to foster more research and experimentation in this standard interface," Welch said."

Complete Story

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