Sun's open source storage solutions - loving aliteration

I attended the London OpenSolaris users group a few weeks ago and the main topic was their moves to include OpenSolaris into there new SAN storage solutions and how this would be open source and community driven. This appeals as a positively gauranteed future proofing of your storage, which for Enterprises and Governments can only be an exceptionally good thing. You are not tying your "Crown Jewels", the life blood of your organisation, to the proprietary whims of the current storage suppliers.

This I found very interesting, as the massive amount of money that certain large storage vendors extract from their entrapped customers can be truely eye watering, EMC2 and NetApp take a bow now.

It also started me to wonder about the future direction of OpenSolaris , as it will obviously suit some customers to continue their server solutions with Solaris rather than Linux, but it will also now be driven by the requirements to support Sun's SAN/NAS hardware products. I think the chances of it ever becoming a serious desktop operating system are shrinking into the distance, I know I have tried it.

Sun are certainly leveraging their ZFS and Dtrace in this new arena, and I have to say with some considerably success, if the figures being thrown around at the meeting were anything to go by. Dtrace is being used extensively with the storage network management tools, which are also open source and free with the product, and can offer a level of visibilty not seen on other products.This is a massive cost saving for all.

I know the buzz in the storage world at the moment is Flash Disk storage, and how this can be included in your storage hierarchy to improve performance and flexibility. I can see that Sun have this embedded into their latest offerings, and though we are at the early stages of this, it is obvious to me that this is the future direction of storage networks. This is not simply for performance , though that is compelling enough, it is for the datacentre space you will save and the amount of energy you will save. These last two points add up to some serious money savings going forward, and in these hard economic times that can't be ignored.

I think that having worked in this area for many years, that these new products from Sun truely are original and extremely useful, and you would be silly not to have them on your shortlist if you are looking for new/extra storage.

The one caveat is that currently they don't offer firbre channel until the end of this year, but with iSCSI performance I don't see this as a massive issue, but it could be for some.

If you are a Linux house you might worry about how this works within your infrastructure, but as the OpenSolaris can be as visible or invisible as you like, I see this as a benefit over other vendors proprietary offerings.

Go and have a look for yourself, and see what you think.

Suns Open Source Storage

Happy New Year Tux

I read a blog by a long time Linux supporter , Stephen J Vaughan, and he made a statement that in his opinion the year of the Linux desktop had already come and gone. Well I have been mulling over this thought for a few days and I have to say I agree with him.

I'm currently posting this from my Eeepc running Eeebuntu Linux, and I haven't used anything on my desktop/laptop computer since 1998 that wasn't a version of one kind of Linux or another. As I work in the IT industry and have to communicate with other people who use Microsoft, it is obvious that it is perfectly possible for them to co-exist, as I'm doing it on a daily basis.

I'm also a big user of virtual environments, and I have an XP virtual machine on my works desktop, but I honestly haven't powered that up in long time. I tend to use the virtualisation software, KVM at the moment, for testing new operating systems, like Opensolaris etc.

Yes I do agree with you Stephen,the perennial question no longer needs to be asked, it is as irrelevant as asking if this is going to be the year of the laptop.

I think a far more interesting question, is when will Microsoft deliver a decent and relevant operating system since the release of XP seven years ago? Linux is delivering today on a whole range of products, including multiple processor types. I can get the same command prompt on everything from an IBM z90 mainframe to my Google phone, seemless. Same Bash, same commands, no new interface to learn and assimilate.

I also use firefox, which is a great broswer, but more importantly it also runs on every operating system I need to use, again no need to learn another application, just because I have to work with Solaris today. Can you say the same about IE. Suddenly their technological silo concept looks very dated and very last century.

I think the ball is firmly in Redmonds court to deliver, the view from planet Tux is looking decidedly rosey.

So my new years question has to be , "When are Microsoft going to deliver anything Interesting".

Suns Opensolaris who is it for, and does anyone care?

I recently attended a London Opensolaris user group meeting(LOSUG) , at Suns London briefing centre. The meeting was to show the latest release of Opensolaris, and a presentation of the "great" new features for the desktop that this operating system would bring . The presentation was given by Jim Hughes, who is CTO of the Solaris Operating System, and someone who certainly knows Solaris.

I joined this meeting with high expectations, as a long time Unix user, almost exclusively Linux for the last decade, but I have used Sun products for many years and have a great deal of respect for their OS. I have always found that their package and patch management processes to be arcane, but reliable.

I was not to be disappointed, as Ian Murdochs Debian hand could be clearly seen on the revamped package manager, which is a direct copy of the Debian Linux package manager, not a great surprise as Ian had been put in charge of the "Indiana" project. He must have rolled on the floor laughing when he first saw their original setup. Their strategy on software repositories however is muddled and not clear, some being owned and run by Sun, others by the community. This will lead to accusations of not truly being Open at all.

That is just the problem I have with this project, it is playing catchup with Linux/BSD from the early part of this millennium, and is not offering anything new, with the notable exception of ZFS, which Jim did bang on about.

The audience burst into a round of applause when I pointed out that the default shell was now Bash, which is very worrying, and I became aware that a lot of the hardcore Solaris guys in that room are living in another era, which could explain the lack of forward thinking that is going into this product.

Gnome was version 2.18, and there was nothing of any particular note other than ZFS, as impressive a technology as that is. Jim seemed to have a real hatred of Linux, and spent too much time saying how Opensolaris would be just what everyone wanted. I took from this that he was really worried that Sun were doing too little too late, and they were extremely worried that Linux had already eaten the breakfast and lunch of the desktop Unix market, and were now after their evening meal. I think Sun have every reason to be worried as I believe this has already happened, just look at the success of the UMPC's like the ASUS eeepc and the Everex cloudbooketc. You can also now buy pre-installed Linux from all of the tier 1 hardware suppliers with HP's announce at Brainshare last week.

We did see a demo of Opensolaris being installed on an Apple Macbook pro, which worked well, as this to be fair is an early version of the OS. This again though, is nothing earth shattering, as I can install many versions of Linux on a Mac if I so choose, and waste vast sums of money on some over priced technology.

So in answer to my own question, I think the target market will be people who work with Solaris on a regular basis and can't face changing to anything new, not an enormous market. As the project stands, I can't say that what is currently on offer would be useful to me over Fedora Linux which I use on a daily basis. The hardware and software support is just not there, and is unlikely to be there unless a very large community develops around the project.

I also suspect that most if not all Linux users will feel the same, and therefore will not care what Sun are doing. I can see this as becoming just another Sun failure to deliver a decent desktop OS, and they know deep down they should have bought Apple when they could, and then they wouldn't have had to bother.

The likely outcome now is that the MP3 behemoth is likely to buy them to add some serious backend server technology to their product range, we shall see.