"Open storage refers to storage systems built with an open architecture using industry-standard hardware and open-source software," writes Aaron Newcomb in his blog entitled "What Is Open Storage Anyway?" He continues with comments on open source software, open standards and open architecture, all in an effort to address the concerns potential users might have concerning the illusion that reliability is a quality found only in the proprietary realm.

Newcomb then proceeds to outline a framework that defines the different areas Open Storage comprises so that readers will understand where a given product or component fits in the open storage framework.

The elements of this open storage framework in Newcomb's scheme include such things as applications, open utilities, open protocols (in the software sector); compute, memory cache and storage (in the hardware sector). He discusses each.

To demonstrate the growing understanding within the industry of this framework, Newcomb cites the comments of Don MacAskill of SmugMug, who blogged, "A storage device should be just a server with some open-source software and lots of disks. (The 'open source' part is important. I’m sick of relying on closed-source RAID firmware). The amount of flexibility, performance, reliability and operational cost savings you can achieve with software RAID rather than hardware is enormous. With real datacenter-grade flash storage devices just around the corner, this becomes even more vital. ZFS makes all of this stuff Just Work, including properly adjusting the write caches on the disk, eliminating the RAID-5 write hole, etc." See MacAskill's article [21426].

The same degree of commendable awareness is evident in the work at Joyent, Newcomb writes, citing the company's involvement in the OpenSolaris storage community. Joyent provides a highly scalable, on-demand infrastructure for Web sites, Newcomb writes, adding the comment of Rod Boothby, vice president of Platform Evangelism at Joyent, who says, “We've scaled clients up to over 1 billion page views a month using Joyent Accelerators built on ZFS, D-Trace and Containers in OpenSolaris.”

More Information

Sun Open Storage

OpenSolaris

MacAskill's talk at the 2009 OpenSolaris Storage Summit [...read more...]

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