Now if you know nothing about OpenSolaris, Open Storage, or how you might use them together: I just listened to a podcast from Nexenta and Sun about the OpenSolaris and Open Storage initiative. You might want to do the same. But here is my take:

We all know that Solaris has been involved with the Open Source community for quite some time. Well Nexenta has too, since 2006, and have an open solaris distribution. They have 100's of thousand downloads for this operating system, good support from the open source community. They have a team of founders that have quite a bit of experience in the Linux and BSD world, are committed to storage and the Solaris kernel because of the strength of that kernel and what the file system brings you. They say, and I probably believe, there is no comparison in the Linux world. Plus they did develop the iSCSI stack that was adopted by the Linux community. Sounds pretty impressive.

They go on to say that they are involved with Open Solaris because they have gone about as far as they can within the Linux world and get really excited about Open Solaris because of the ZFS file system which brings enterprise class storage to everyone. Mostly because of the capability to virtualize your storage pool, take advantage of provisioning and pooling I/Os. To date, they have seen great opportunities in the market place to take advantage of an open solution-pointing to both video adn CAD applications. The uniqueness of this being that video and CAD are two completely different beasts. Video is about large/big I/O and data transfer while CAD applications deal with small/tiny I/O. Remember we talked about MBPS and IOPS a few posts ago?

This podcast is a good, easy to listen, and informative. It is only 21 minutes long and I took it in while replying to emails.
Go to Community on the Sun Open Storage page and look for Podcast: Evan Powell, CEO Nexenta