Sun Microsystems Fuels Revolution for Open Storage, Solaris ZFS; 20% Growth Posted in Past Quarter : Leading Online Music Discovery Company OurStage

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (Business Wire EON) August 20, 2008 -- Online music discovery company OurStage (www.ourstage.com) uses these open technologies to prevent vendor lock-in and to help vendors realize greater choice, flexibility and cost savings.

As the first major vendor to recognize this industry shift to open platforms, Sun led the charge and added leading storage services and data protection functions to Solaris ZFS, introduced the world's first hybrid server and storage platform in the Sun Fire(TM) X4500 family and created the world's first Open Storage community. The innovative Solaris ZFS sets Sun apart, enabling developers and enterprise customers to leverage open source file systems and create pools of data that deliver better system performance, flexibility and value.

"In just 90 days, we've witnessed significant participation levels from new OpenSolaris Storage community members and contributions of exciting storage projects, showing the world that Open Storage is real and gaining serious steam," said Jim McHugh, vice-president, Solaris marketing, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "By offering cutting edge companies like OurStage an open source operating system that includes Solaris ZFS, Sun continues to help build the community for OpenSolaris while driving adoption of our industry-leading operating system. No other company is better positioned to take advantage of this rising tide."

Open Storage Takes Center Stage with OurStage

OurStage.com gives up-and-coming music artists a chance to have their work seen and heard while site users pick monthly winners in various genres for cash, performance gigs, and mentor session prizes. Founded in 2006, the company moved its production storage systems to OpenSolaris to improve load balancing and I/O performance. OpenSolaris, ZFS and development applications like Ruby on Rails have provided OurStage with an easily scalable enterprise solution to accommodate future growth of the Web site.

In migrating to OpenSolaris and ZFS, OurStage realized significant benefits: easier overall system administration through improved management tools, greater scalability and better performance for Web and application servers.

"Since OpenSolaris was created, tested and supported by Sun and it provides us with enterprise level quality, performance and consistency that we need. We have also saved time and money through this open model and believe the growth of the OpenSolaris Storage community is good for the industry. Having Sun play such a key role in its development just furthers its chances for success," said David Pascoe, Vice President of Operations, OurStage.

Well Over 40 Open Storage Projects Under Way

With new projects being created almost weekly within the OpenSolaris Storage community, there are now 40 projects which a developer can participate that span a wide range of solutions needed by the storage community. In particular, three interesting community projects are detailed below.

Project Celeste: The aim of this project to build a peer-to-peer and fault-tolerant distributed storage system. Celeste stores data as files and this stored data is replicated on many different nodes and allows for the availability of data in the event there is a loss or absence of some subset of these nodes. Project Celeste originated as Sun[TM Labs research project that investigated techniques for building large scale, distributed storage systems that work not only in dedicated data centers, but in open and potentially hostile environments such as the Internet. To learn more, go to http://opensolaris.org/os/project/celeste Project FUSE: FUSE stands for 'File system in User Space' and the aim of this project is to provide a simple interface to allow implementation of a fully functional file system in user-space. The project will enable greater flexibility for code development, interoperability across multiple operating systems and kernel recompilation. For more information, please see http://opensolaris.org/os/project/fuse/ Project Common Array Manager: Disk storage device management software written in Java that currently ties together Sun's midrange family of disk storage systems in an administrator friendly way. The software includes a web application allowing the user to manage their systems from any browser and a command line utility which provides a facility for automating and scripting disk management operations and tasks. With a plug-in architecture adding support for new devices is just a matter of implementing a plugin using the forthcoming CAM device SDK. With this design CAM can administer any disk systems whether hardware or software based (such as Common SCSI Targets (COMSTAR)). For more information, please see: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/cam Open Storage Goes Global

Sun also today announced that the OpenSolaris Storage community pages have been translated into six additional languages: Chinese, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. The availability of these new languages allows developers across the world to leverage free and open storage communities and to create new storage solutions quickly and inexpensively. Sun plans to continue to add more languages going forward, to help build the global eco-system for Open Storage.

Join the Open Storage Revolution: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/

Developers can learn more that the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Storage Developer Conference http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2008/, at which Sun is a platinum sponsor and will host the first-ever OpenSolaris Developer Summit. For more information see http://opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/Summit08.

For more information, please see www.sun.com/openstorage

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the Computer(TM)" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries an on the Web at http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun Logo, Solaris, Sun Fire, Solaris ZFS, OpenSolaris, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.