Sun wants Open Storage...

Sun Microsystems wants to nudge storage toward a more open framework while helping the industry to do more with flash disk drives than merely replace spinning hard drives. Sun, which traditionally has been the least successful of the IT industry's major system players to attach storage sales to its server sales, feels that storage vendors have followed a proprietary model for too long, said Graham Lovell, senior director of open storage and networking for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor.

"Storage is very closed today,We want to differentiate with a paradigm that is much more open going forward"

Lovell said. For Sun, that means taking advantage of its commitment to open source, including its OpenSolaris and its ZFS storage operating system, Lovell said. Sun made its OpenSolaris operating system available as a free download early last month.

CRN