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Feature Story

April 29, 2008 - At Sun we foster open communities through our open source initiatives that help everyone get the most from their technology choices. Communities include OpenSolaris, Open Storage, Java, MySQL, NetBeans, Glassfish, and others, covering just about every technological environment, from cell phones to mainframe computers.

We invite you to join these communities, download the software, and be a part the most exciting and innovative projects on the planet. Working together in these communities we can create technology that is more capable, and that reaches farther and supports more people and systems, than any closed, proprietary technology ever could.

Jonathan Schwartz on Open Communities

Wach Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's keynote address at the recent MySQL Conference and Expo to learn about Sun and its role in open communities, how the open source approach of these communities benefits every technology from cell phones to supercomputers.

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Open Storage Community

This week we want to especially recognize the growth in Sun's new and innovative Open Storage community. Launched as part of OpenSolaris last year Open Storage frees users from the vendor lock-in associated with proprietary storage technologies -- often called the last bastion of proprietary technology in the datacenter -- and enables them to create secure, high-performance storage environments that don't cost a fortune.

The Open Storage Community has gained substantial momentum in the last year. In this video Solaris Data business director Lynn Rohrer talks with Solaris group marketing manager Matthew Baier about how this new and vibrant Open Storage community was started and has grown during the year, and how it has benefited users.

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When Sun's Open Storage, open source software is combined with industry standard hardware it can give enterprises, web services companies, and developers storage solutions with better reliability and greater scalability at much lower cost than are available with closed, proprietary solutions. And, they can be developed rapidly, on multiple platforms with support of the open source community.

Sun's storage experts can help architect cost-effective storage infrastructures tailored to your organizations' specific needs. By starting with an assessment of your current situation, Sun Services consultants can recommend the best combination of open source software and industry-standard hardware to meet your needs. No matter what size of business, from medium-size businesses through enterprises, or what type, including traditional and Web scale businesses.

As Digitar CTO Jason Williams says of Open Storage, "It has all of the features of an expensive array, and because it allows you to build reliable storage out of commodity components, you can build the storage architecture you need instead of being held hostage by the one you can afford...You can pick and choose the pieces that fit your needs and make any existing architecture better too."

Nexenta CEO Evan Powell discusses the bourgeoning cost of storage solutions in the certified partner NeoTactics blog, and says, "Fortunately, there is a very compelling new solution to this problem. Sun's ZFS is now available and production worthy. ZFS is a revolutionary new open source filesystem that provides all of the capabilities of a NetApp storage appliance, in terms of redundancy, ease of use, and capabilities (e.g. NFS, iSCSI, Windows File Sharing). It requires Solaris, OpenSolaris, NexentaOS or FreeBSD to run, but will work on most modern hardware.

ZFS provides a cost-effective option for tier-2 (and some tier-1) storage solutions. No special hardware or RAID controllers are necessary. It is designed to work on both inexpensive commodity and enterprise class hardware.

Using ZFS you can now build high-capacity, redundant storage systems for as little as $.25-.50/GB, which is pretty close to street price for the drives themselves. Alternatively, you can build tier-1 high-performance redundant storage systems, roughly equivalent in quality to enterprise solutions, for as low as $2/GB, which is practically unheard of.

These benefits are typical of those afforded by all open communities, and the reason Sun continues to create these communities, foster them, and support open communities that have been started by others.