The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Storage: Sun's Open Source Archiving with Project Honeycomb
Sun has Open-Sourced their Project Honeycomb software, the software that powers their StorageTek 5800 Archive System. The software will run on any standard x86 system and can be downloaded here. The source code is archived at the OpenSolaris storage and Java.net communities. Sun is also trying to get the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) interested in adopting their contribution as a standard.
Sun is giving the software away as a means to create interest in their solution and to convert those users into customers of their Sun/StorageTek hardware. Project Honeycomb was created with the vision of being able to store massive amounts of static data. The architecture design is to off-load processing from the application to the storage server. That includes functions like metadata management, queries, and data services. Data operations are removed from the application and brought closer to the storage system.
The storage hardware is programmable with embedded intelligence that give it the smarts to be able to act on data coming into and out of the system. Mike Davis, senior product manager at Sun described it as follows:
There are two elements to Honeycomb: a highly reliable Serial ATA-based storage system based on a clustered architecture and a rich extensibility framework for access and management of data. Embedded in the cluster is fully distributed high performance database technology that is aligned very well with the storage system.
Honeycomb’s architecture is designed to reduce or eliminate bottlenecks and single points of failure that exist in legacy architectures. Built-in parallelism improves performance and provides outstanding performance for query as well as data I/O.
Large repositories need failure resilience — the ability to suffer multiple types of failures without risk of losing data integrity. Through parallelism, Honeycomb can provide a level of reliability that is arguably better than what customers can get in any SAN environment.
The trick now will be for Sun to recruit partners and software creators to build applications that can plug into the Honeycomb infrastructure.
