In addition, Sun said it has expanded its online and phone service capabilities to speed open storage application development. The company said it would answer questions ranging from open storage architectural design for a proprietary system to data migration needs. More detail is available here.

Since Sun released OpenSolaris in November 2004, the operating system's development community has grown to about 3,000 members working on about 30 specific improvement projects, a Sun spokesperson told eWEEK.

The company's foundation for all this to-be-developed software is centered on the industrial-strength, 48-drive Sun Fire x4500 "Thumper" storage server—which Sun touts as the world's first hybrid server/storage data server—and the Solaris ZFS file system within OpenSolaris. However, Sun says it will work with virtually any kind of hardware in setting up an open-source storage system.

New Sun storage Senior Vice President Jon Benson, in one of his first interviews since taking over his new job, told eWEEK that every data system has to have the servers, the networking and the storage hardware to get started, but the software stack "is actually what sets the personality for what's under the covers."

"A major benefit [of using the open-source software stack] is that you can reprovision a lot of your capital equipment across your environment without having to invest a ton of money in training, new capital or in those kinds of things," Benson said. "This is a good secondary benefit of a system where the control points are sitting in a software stack—which, by the way, being open, there are communities contributing and adding to that—plus, there's the ability of the user to customize some of that, so he can be competitive in his particular marketplace."

Most of the storage industry is still closed and proprietary, with most customers locked in to one particular vendor, said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's Systems Group.

"The storage industry is undergoing a radical transformation that parallels what servers went through a decade ago," Fowler said. "Solaris OS, ZFS … and the work of the OpenSolaris storage community [are providing] rock-solid, enterprise-class scalability and value. The use of open platforms allows developers to repurpose and reuse hardware through the simple addition of new software—something not offered by proprietary solutions."