News

posted on 20 August 2008 12:03

More than 600 new members have joined Sun's OpenSolaris Storage community in the past three months with the number of projects increasing from 30 to 41 and revenues also showing an increase over the same period.

The OpenSolaris Storage community was announced at the end of April with 3,000+ members and 30 active projects. It's aim is to produce a complete open source storage software stack enabling the use of commodity hardweare for strage applications.

Sun's senior director of open storage, Graham Lovell, said: "Over the last 90 days there have been significant new additions to the community's open storage deployments. ... Revenues for open storage have shown an uptick over the last 90 days. We are seeing an uptick in business overall."

There has been a 20 percent rise in membership, meaning around 600 new members, and the number of active projects has increased by a third to 41 - details here.

Three Lovell highlighted are:

1. Celeste which aims to provide a JAVE-written peer-to-peer and fault-tolerant distributed storage system. Celeste stores data as files and this stored data is replicated on many different nodes and allows for the availability of data in the event there is a loss or absence of some subset of these nodes. (See Cleversafe also reported today.)

2. FUSE which provides a file system in user space. This functions as an abstraction layer converting requests to specific individual file system formats such as Linux, BSD Unix, and legacy O/S'.

3. Common Array Manager to manage Sun's arrays, including JBODs, with a plug-in approach to incorporating the ability to manage third-party arrays.

Lovell said that Sun is talking to lots of customers on storage RFP matters and added: "We're finding a good deal of traction and monetization of our strategy."

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}