My two cents, from what I know about the product:
Here's Sun's description, from the white paper
Rethink Storage with Sun Storage 7000 Systems: "Open storage systems combine industry-standard hardware with open-source software..." The idea of "Open Storage" is the use of the technologies in Solaris to squeeze maximum performance out of fairly inexpensive mass-market hardware components. This doesn't mean that you can plug any disks into such a device and have it work and be supported.
The Open Storage products are
storage appliances -- in essence, NAS boxes. Access by clients is via IP over Ethernet or Infiniband. You can add FC or SCSI for tape backups, but I don't believe you can map SCSI targets to these interfaces. Management is via web GUI, except for the initial console-based IP assignment.
Note the configuration menu depicted in the above-mentioned white paper. Here are the choices in the Data Services menu, all network protocols:
- NFS
- iSCSI
- CIFS
- FTP
- HTTP
- NDMP
- Virus Scan
I believe the 7000 boxes have you configure all the storage as a single ZFS pool, then create various filesystem shares out of that pool. Like any NAS device, access is file-based, except for iSCSI, for which the server presents iSCSI volumes for block-based access. (Underneath, the iSCSI volume is a big ZFS file.)
Sun built on top of OpenSolaris because key pieces were already part of OpenSolaris, e.g. kernel-level, Microsoft-compliant CIFS support. You never (or at least very rarely) should be aware it's OpenSolaris under the hood, though.
Sun innovated in the use of flash for both read and write caching. In particular, the write-caching flash memory is assigned to ZFS's level 2 adaptive replacement cache (L2ARC), greatly accelerating writes. (These modules are of a different design than the read-cache flash, another reason this isn't a roll-your-own product.) In addition the DTrace analytics give you the ability to do ad hoc deep analysis of performance data, textually and graphically.
The benefits to the end user include the capacity/performance bang-for-the-buck, and the great utility afforded by the simple yet powerful GUI, including the DTrace analytics, ZFS snapshots, and all the other stuff you can read about in the white papers. You can also
demo the entire environment in VMware or VirtualBox -- it won't perform like the real thing (especially the flash component) but the entire management environment is there.
Hope that helps,
Dave
