by Liem Nguyen, (former) Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — August 19, 2010
Many of you know the Compellent zNAS platform is a ZFS-based NAS integrated with the Fluid Data architecture. The zNAS interface unifies file and block storage management and we collaborated on it with our friends over at Nexenta. So it’s no surprise that we’ve been getting questions about how current events in the ZFS community, particularly the leaked Oracle memo on the future of OpenSolaris, will impact zNAS. From the SearchStorage article you can glean Evan Powell’s thoughts on the subject. For the Compellent perspective, I sat down with Troy Presler, our zNAS product marketing manager, to get his reaction to the memo.
LN: It’s been a busy few months for you. How are things going with zNAS?
TP: We started shipping last quarter and I’m excited about the reception it’s received so far. Customers and channel partners are really happy about the ZFS platform and the scalability of zNAS. And I’m working with a few of them to share their story publicly. Stay tuned as I expect to be able to talk more openly about these companies after they’ve had a chance to fully implement zNAS.
LN: What are the implications for Compellent due to Oracle’s memo on the Open Solaris community?
TP: Though Oracle hasn’t said anything publicly about the memo, we have no concerns. The community of open source developers for OpenSolaris has a long history of maintaining a high level of autonomy and has built an OS that has become an industry-wide mainstay in many products used by many companies. We expect support and development for ZFS will continue in some form or fashion through OpenSolaris, Illumos or a future, community-supported environment. In addition, there are indications that Oracle will continue to fund development of Solaris and keep things open but with emphasis on business value first and releasing code only after it does so internally with its developers first. Sounds like business as usual with a checkpoint stop at the Oracle train station first.
LN: How does this affect zNAS?
TP: Compellent will continue to support and sell the zNAS product with ZFS. We have a solid partnership with Nexenta around continued ZFS development and support for our zNAS product. Nothing will change. We are full speed ahead and excited by what the zNAS product offers our customers. zNAS users can easily manage both blocks and files, scale capacity without downtime and leverage the Fluid Data features, like automated tiered storage and thin provisioning, that have become synonymous with Compellent.