* Enterprise storage administrators can now expand their use of open source tools thanks to Sun
Enterprise storage administrators looking to expand their use of open source tools received good news from Sun last week, as the vendor released a bevy of its disk, file system and storage device drivers to its OpenSolaris community.
Sun, along with storage partners, announced nearly a dozen tools and other code that will be donated to Sun’s OpenSolaris effort — the vendor’s open source version of its Unix-based operating system.
“This will enable community members to combine OpenSolaris with hardware from any source to create compelling storage solutions at a fraction of the price of traditional proprietary storage vendors,” Sun says.
Some of Sun’s tools and features for managing storage volumes that programmers will have access to include Recursive Snapsots, ZFS Clone Promotion, and Double Parity RAIDZ — code which allows storage users to back up file systems, manipulate copied file systems, and protect data from multiple disk failures on a system.
Sun is also releasing other code, including drivers and utilities, along with storage partners. Drivers for Qlogic Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters will be made available to the OpenSolaris community, as well as drivers for devices that use iSCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP), and Object-Based Storage Device (OSD) storage protocols. Sun is also releasing source code for two commercial utilities: Point-in-Time Copy and Remote Miror. These allow users to create and move around storage volume snapshots among physical devices. Sun is also open sourcing NFS v4.1 — a distributed file system technology.
