Technology Underlying the Sun Storage 7000 Series
I’m late to the party. And I don’t have much to blog about my team’s part in the story of the 7000 Series that I haven’t already blogged, most of it about ID mapping, and some about filesystem internationalization. Except of course, to tell you that today’s product launch is very exciting for me. Not only is this good for Sun’s customers (current and, especially, future!) and for Sun, but it’s also incredibly gratifying to see something that one has worked on hard be part of a major product and be depended on by others.
Above all: Congratulations to the Fishworks team and to the many teams that contributed to making this happen. The list of such teams is long. Between systems engineering, Solaris engineering and the business teams that made all this possible, plus the integration provided by the Fishworks team, this is a truly enormous undertaking. Just look at the implausible list of storage protocols spoken by the storage appliance: CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, FTP, WebDAV, NDMP and VSCAN, all backed by ZFS. I’m barely scratching the surface here. It’s not just the storage protocols; for example, DTrace has an enormous role to play here as well, and there are many other examples.
The best part is the integration, the spectacular BUI (browser user interface). No, wait, the best part is the underlying technologies. No, wait!, the best part is the futures. It’s hard to decide what the best aspect of the Sun Storage 7000 series, the story, the people, the technologies, the future, or even what it says about Sun: that Sun Microsystems can innovate and reinvent itself even when the financials don’t look great, even while doing much of the development in the open!
The new storage appliance was a project of major proportions, much of it undertaken in the open. I wonder how many thought that this was typical of Sun, to develop cool technologies without knowing how to tie them together. I hope we’ve shocked you. Now you know: Sun can complete acquisitions successfully and obtain product synergies (usually a four-letter word, that), Sun can do modular development and bring it all together, Sun can detect new trends in the industry (e.g., read-biased SSDs, write-biased SSDs, …) and capitalize on them, Sun can think outside the box and pull rabbits out of its hat. And you better bet: we can and will keep that up.