Freely available in OpenSolaris, ZFS' Hybrid Storage Pools weave DRAM, solid state drives, and regular disk into a seamless whole Sun just announced a series of open source storage appliances that use OpenSolaris and the ZFS file system. While the hardware includes some interesting options including solid state drives (SSD) for improving both read and write performance, the most alluring features are the file system and the analytics made available through SNIA-standard RPC calls, using the DTrace fault tracing system included in OpenSolaris. These features are not limited to Sun hardware, making it possible to duplicate the functionality with virtually any hardware. [ Read the Test Center review of ZFS and view a screencast demo. ]Among the ZFS goodies are an interesting feature called Hybrid Storage Pools, which integrate DRAM, read-optimized SSDs, write-optimized SSDs, and regular disk into a seamless whole. The SSDs are intended to replace small, expensive, read and write caches with higher-capacity 18GB write-biased SSDs and 100GB read-biased SSDs to get exceptional performance at a cost that should be competitive with more basic storage systems. Sun has done considerable work on the SSDs to avoid the typical issues of limited life spans, over-provisioning the storage and optimizing wear-leveling algorithms to ensure that the SSDs should last a minimum of three years. Given how quickly SSDs are dropping in price, this seems a more than adequate lifetime. DTrace is used to make all sorts of performance data available. The admin can drill down by file system, type of data, type of interface, and other parameters, finding which application is using the most I/Os, or the most bandwidth — even the life left in the SSD drives in the system, which enables extremely granular optimization. No partnerships have been announced yet, but Sun is working with many storage, virtualization, and systems management vendors to ensure that data interchange works well. Between the management capabilities, the clustering capabilities of ZFS, and the data services such as snapshots, cloning, mirroring, replication, compression, thin provisioning, and support for iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, HTTP, and FTP protocols, the Fishworks storage system offers a lot of potential. The Sun hardware should provide good capabilities at a good price. But the best part is that the software magic is also available through the open source OpenSolaris and ZFS, as long as the hardware you choose has all the parts necessary to fully utilize the ZFS capabilities.