The State of Open Source Storage

[ Thanks to Paul Shread for this link. ]

"There is a wide variety of open source storage solutions and applications from different sources, ranging from volume managers, iSCSI and NAS stacks, file systems, clustered file systems, object-based storage solutions, dedupe and compression, among others, not to mention all of the propriety or commercial solutions that may leverage open source technology embedded into turnkey solutions and products," said Schulz. "Of traditional server and storage vendors, Sun is probably the most notable and vocal around open source storage, along with many smaller startup vendors."

"Sun's "Amber Road" project, now known as Unified Storage Systems (UFS) or the Sun Storage 7000 series, is built around preinstalled OpenSolaris and ZFS on x86 hardware. These units support both file and block data protocols, thin provisioning, replication, mirroring, snapshots, antivirus and analytics. An HPC version adds Linux to the mix too.

"Amber Road is essentially a NAS system that integrates inexpensive servers with open source software in an easy-to-use appliance," said David Trachy, a principal engineer at Sun. "The whole point is to get around the premium you have to pay for proprietary disk systems."

Complete Story

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