The company said that it created a storage community within the open source project for its Solaris operating system last month, Sun said.
Pitching its storage efforts, Sun said that recent pieces of Solaris storage code that have been made open source include the company’s Availability Suite, and its LoopX file driver, together with tools for the Solaris ZFS file system such as a clone and snapshot management.
More code will go open source in future, including Sun’s QFS file system, its SAM Storage Archive Manager, and its kernel based CIFS server.
Ovum analyst Carl Greiner said: It’s not obvious which enterprise users are going to take this up. Perhaps it will play into the compute-intensive or educational markets. But those aren’t mainstream, and if there is any money to be made there, it’s going to take some time.
Sun published Solaris 10, including the ZFS file system, as open source code in June 2005. Since then Solaris 10 has been downloaded an impressive 7 million times. But Sun was not able to name any customers using its open source storage code, and the only IT vendor it could name was Apple, which it said will use Sun’s Dtrace performance optimizer in a future version of the Mac OS.
