"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."
