Fishworks

When you think about Open Solaris you have mane really unique features there which you can't find on other platforms. Then there is a big market of customers who don't have or don't need proper skills to be able to use these tools - what they want is an appliance aproach, when you put something in your network and it just works for you. It would be great if one could get all the benefits of Open Solaris and yet didn't had to be a sr sys admin in order to be able to use them. When it comes to NAS appliances Fishworks is just that. It's like an NetApp filer but better - more flexible, more scalable, better performance and cheaper. You can find a good overview on new appliances here.

It is really interesting to know how it all started three years ago. About a year later Bryan asked me if I want to participate in eval program for Fishworks - I didn't even know what it was back then but hey.. it's Bryan, it has to be something exiting! So I said yes right a way :) :) :)

Now it the environments I use to work I'm not that big enthusiast for appliances nevertheless I can appreciate them in environments they belong to - and I really believe that what they come up with will be a disruptive technology in a market where NetApp has almost a monopoly and is charging insane money for their proprietary technology. Don't get me wrong, NetApp does provide very good technology - it's just that it always has been overpriced and there was no real competition for them. Thanks to open source technologies like Open Solaris, ZFS, Dtrace, etc. it's no longer the case. Actually in the environments I used to work thanks to Open Solaris/ZFS NetApp usually is no longer an option at all. Now thanks to Fishworks you have the alternative for NetApp, and I believe it is a much better alternative. And for everyone for who it is important - Fishworks is built on top of open source software with file system being the most important building block. NetApp file system is a proprietary and closed and you end-up being locked-in by them to some degree.

Almost two years ago I wrote one of my emails with observations about early Fishworks prototype and I was so exited with Analytics that I went wild and proposed to create Doctor D! - virtual advisor which would help you to tell what's wrong with your system and what you should do to improve the situation. Of course we can't deliver something like this in a forseable future. Nevertheless the Analytics gives you so much insight in a system that in essence you are becoming Doctor D! All you need to do is to correlate all forensic data presented to you in a very attractive manner. Of course it uses DTrace underneath, that's where D! is coming from, but because we are talking about appliance you don't have to know Dtrace or any other OS tools at all and yet still you can harnes the power of these tools and fix your issue.


You can get more information on official Fishworks blog.
Also check below blogs for more interesting info.

• Mike Shapiro with an overview of the products
• Bryan Cantrill on the history of Fishworks
• Adam Leventhal on hybrid storage pools
• Eric Schrock on hardware integration
• Keith Wesolowski on clustering
• Brendan Gregg on the dashboard
• Todd Patrick on the interface design for projects
• Cindi McGuire with some introductory thoughts on Fishworks
• Roch Bourbonnais on performance improvements
• Bill Pijewski on Windows features and interoperability
• Roch Bourbonnais on performance metrics
• Dave Pacheco on HTTP/WebDAV integration
• Bill Pijewski on kiosk users and session annotations
• BM Seer on a variety of aspects of performance. [1] [2] [3] [4]
• How much code is Fishworks?

New stories I got from here:


Wall Street Journal: Sun Expands 'Open' Storage Line
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122627611222612077.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Forbes: Sun's Flash of Hope
http://www.forbes.com/cionetwork/2008/11/08/sun-storage-memory-tech-enter-cx_ag_1110sun.html

San Jose Mercury News: Sun hopes new line of storage servers will help revive its fortunes
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_10929798?nclick_check=1

eWeek: Sun Discards RAID in Its First-ever Storage Appliance
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Sun-Unveils-Its-Firstever-Storage-Appliance/

IDG News Service: Sun Rolls out Its Own Storage Appliances
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/153566/sun_rolls_out_its_own_storage_appliances.html

InformationWeek: Sun Unveils 'Open Storage' Appliances
http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/systems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212001591

The Register: Sun trumpets radically simple open storage boxes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/10/suns_amber_road_storage/

CRN: Sun Intros Solid State Drives, Analytics In Storage Line
http://www.crn.com/storage/212001321

CNET News: Sun expands its open storage line, hopes for accelerated growth
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10092362-16.html

ZDNet: Sun claims to revolutionise storage with new array
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39547411,00.htm

TheStreet: Sun to Unveil New Open Storage Hardware
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10446870/1/sun-to-introduce-new-open-storage-hardware.html?puc=googlefi&cm_ven=GOOGLEFI&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA