Sun Microsystems announced the addition of developer tools and expanded professional service capabilities to help developers better leverage the growing open source communities that are fast changing the economics of the storage IT landscape. Over 3,000 members and 30+ projects within an active and growing OpenSolaris storage community demonstrate a groundswell within the storage industry for developers and enterprise companies to use open source alternatives to expensive proprietary storage offerings.

Today's storage industry is still largely closed and proprietary, with most customers locked-in to one particular vendor. Sun has opened up the storage platform to deliver increases in performance and price-performance for customers and, at the same time, created a whole new world for developers to build new applications and innovation in the storage world. The use of open platforms allows developers to re-purpose and re-use hardware through the simple addition of new software - something not offered by proprietary solutions.

"The storage industry is undergoing a radical transformation that parallels what servers went through a decade ago," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Solaris OS, ZFS and the work of the OpenSolaris storage community provide rock-solid, enterprise class scalability and value, giving customers a low-cost way to leverage these open architectures without sacrificing quality or reliability."

Sun has provided the foundation for this industry shift through the creation of the OpenSolaris storage community. Existing products like the popular Sun Fire x4500 server "Thumper" system - the world's first hybrid server/storage data server - and the Solaris ZFS file system capabilities within the Solaris OS help customers reduce costs by up to 90% through the use of open source software on industry standard systems.

New Tools from Sun Help Enable Developers to Build Storage Servers in 10 Minutes or Less
Sun introduced new developer tools, recipes and how-to guides that provide insight on a wide variety of developmental issues. These new tools, easy-to-use videos and accompanying online guides provide developers the tools needed to build rock-solid storage systems quickly and efficiently:

• Build a OpenSolaris operating system storage server in 10 minutes or less: this how-to recipe is intended to familiarize developers with the simple commands in Solaris for performing data management tasks, i.e. ZFS, NFS, CIFS, COMSTAR; For more information, please see: http://developers.sun.com/openstorage/articles/opensolaris_storage_server.html
• Simple Steps to building a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance: this how-to recipe describes the steps required to build a NAS device with OpenSolaris operating system quickly and easily. Read about how easy it can be at: http://blogs.sun.com/icedawn/

In addition, expanded Sun service capabilities were released to speed open storage application development and help customers safely make the transition to an open storage infrastructure. Whether it is an open storage architectural design from a proprietary system or data migration need, Sun services brings technical expertise into the growing open storage arena and will continue to expand open storage capabilities to address community needs.

Sun Customers Save Money Through Open Storage
Gracenote, SearchForce, DigiTar, Joyent and other industry leaders leverage Sun open storage solutions like the Sun Fire x4500 server system and Solaris ZFS technology to break through the economic stranglehold of closed systems. By leveraging Sun services, advanced developer tools and the community approach to creating and upgrading storage software and other applications, DigiTar CTO Jason Williams saves time and, more importantly, significantly cuts costs in his datacenter - read his blog here: Jason's Blog

"Sun has provided a platform for the democratization of the storage industry," said Jason Williams, CTO of DigiTar. "We have found the appropriate level of operating system support we need to run our business through the OpenSolaris storage community, which saves significant time and money. I participate in the community daily and see real business value in the projects that are being created by some of the industry's most important players."

"We've scaled clients up to over one billion page views a month using Joyent Accelerators built on OpenSolaris," said Rod Boothby, vice-president, Platform Evangelism at Joyent.

Thousands Join Open Storage Community
Comprised of over 3000 members and spanning many significant projects (such as SVM, UFS, NFS, ZFS etc.), the Open Storage movement led by Sun has established one of the fastest growing open source communities. Storage industry providers like Hitachi Data Systems, Qlogic and Emulex have contributed their software to the OpenSolaris community. Other community participants include storage solutions vendors like Nexenta, which leverages OpenSolaris OS and ZFS innovation to deliver a NAS software solution. In addition, instructor-training provider LiveAmmo uses the OpenSolaris OS innovation of Project COMSTAR to provide its customers with a low cost fibre channel SAN infrastructure. Companies across the IT landscape are also using OpenSolaris storage technologies within their product offerings, for example database leader MySQL; content management companies Drupal; Confluence and Alfresco; and CRM provider SugarCRM and others.

"The enterprise shift to open storage solutions is now. As a participating member of the OpenSolaris community since 2006, we've leveraged the strengths of the Solaris kernel and the innovation provided by ZFS to offer NexentaStor, a software solution that, for the first time, makes enterprise class storage available to everyone," said Even Powell, CEO of Nexenta. "In combination with industry standard high performance and high density storage servers, NexentaStor is saving customers time and money over legacy storage systems at a time when data is growing faster than legacy solution architectures and our enterprise customers budgets can address."