It’s just a tiny part of a $13 billion company, but Sun Microsystems’ (NASDAQ: JAVA) Open Storage program exemplifies everything the company had hoped to achieve in its turnaround efforts.
Built on intelligent storage controllers, industry standard hardware and open source software, the program achieved 63 percent year-over-year growth in billings in one of the worst markets in memory for data storage spending.
What’s more, the program has been able to convert users who download Sun’s open source software into paying customers, realizing a central vision of CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
“We’re able to monetize a lot of these open source opportunities,” said Graham Lovell, director of Sun’s Open Storage efforts. “We’re the poster child for the success of Jonathan’s strategy.”
With $127 million in billings in the last four quarters, just a small part of Sun’s $2 billion data storage business, the Open Storage program might not be big enough to have much of an effect on Sun’s overall business, but Lovell said he and other members of the team have joked about what a good startup the program would make.
“If this was a startup, we’d be having celebrations in the street,” he said.
Read whole article (enterprisestorageforum.com)
When will a public alpa / beta be made available. Will it support ppc Mac?
can’t wait for the release…
Release date not known yet.
Having played around with FreeNAS and liking what it did, but dissapointed with the performance of FreeBSD/UFS/RAID5 accessed over Samba (~25Mbytes/s writes), I’ve tried Ubuntu server/ext4/RAID5, which I understand OpenMediaVault will run on, and using the same hardware I’ve seen >68Mbyte/s writes.
So, I’ve now forgone the niceties of the FreeNAS GUI and ease of use, for a manually configured Linux solution with much higher performance, at the expense of greatly reduced ease of manageability. I would so much like to regain what I’ve lost by having OpenMediaVault!
From what I’ve seen of OpenMediaVault, it has a reasonable amount of quality funtionality, but with a list of outstanding functionality that’s needed. I’ve also seen the “It’ll ship when it’s ready statement”. I’m a great believer in shipping software with a limited number of quality features, rather than buggy software with more features. The great thing with this software is that more complex functionality can be achieved at the command line, but the GUI provided ease of use for the majority of tasks. Also, providing early access to software is a very good way of finding the bugs in the core functionality, giving a more solid foundation to build upon.
To that end, would I be out of order requesting that an Alpha release (ie good enough quality to expose to the world, but lacking a number of features) be released to at least a number of testers? The chances are that 20% of the functionality is all 80% of us need anyway!!!
Keep up the good (great!) work, and I eagerly await the first release.
Steve