Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) will introduce a storage appliance based on its FISHworks software package by the end of this year and later extend the technology to other types of products through partnerships.
FISHworks is a set of software components for building specialized appliances on industry-standard x86 hardware. Though it runs best on Sun equipment and the company’s OpenSolaris open-source operating system, the software theoretically could work on other platforms, according to Sun.
The idea behind FISHworks is to offer the all-in-one simplicity of an appliance, fully tested and configured, with open-source software and commodity hardware. FISHworks stands for Fully Integrated Software and Hardware, but will get a new name when it is commercially released, said Mike Shapiro, a distinguished engineer in Sun’s FISHworks group.
The platform was announced in February 2007 and had been expected earlier this year, but Sun said it has been fine-tuning it so it’s a fully baked product when it hits the market. The company joins a growing list of big vendors working on virtual appliance platforms, including IBM, VMware, Red Hat and Novell, according to IDC analyst Brett Waldman. Unlike conventional appliances, virtual ones aren’t tied to a particular hardware system.
Sun is using FISHworks in a reinvention of its storage products around its own intellectual property, after selling storage products it brought on through acquisitions for several years, Shapiro said. The high-performance NAS (network-attached storage) appliances coming later this year will be designed for large enterprises. FISHworks will use Sun’s ZFS (Zettabyte File System) storage software, which has distinctive Sun features including an analytics tool that uses the company’s DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) technology.