More Code Set Free: Sun Open Sources SAM and QFS File Systems

Published: March 25, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems has been on a tear in the past three years--yes, it has been that long--to open source its entire stack of systems and development tool software, and last week another two bits of code were set free out there on the Internet.

Specifically, the Storage Archive Manager, formerly known as StorEdge SAM but now slapped with the StorageTek moniker even though StorageTek had nothing to do with this code, and its related Quick File System, now called StorageTek QFS and also having no history with that company, have been taken open source through the OpenSolaris project. (Neither program was created by Sun, incidentally, but by a storage company called LSC that Sun acquired in 2001 as part of its first attempt at building up its storage business, the acquisition of StorageTek being the second attempt.) QFS is a file system that has been extended to run on clustered disk arrays (up to 128, and soon to be 256), and SAM provides a hierarchical storage manager that can move files around disk arrays and tape subsystems in a machine to optimize performance and minimize nearline data requirements. QFS 4.5 only supported Solaris servers, but with QFS 4.6, Sun added support for Linux platforms. SAM 4.6 is supported on Solaris and Linux as well.

Sun has charged $8,000 for a QFS license, but SAM was distributed for free with a 90-day license and then presumably a perpetual license or a support contract kicked in. The other presumption we have to make is that Sun will eventually get around to publishing a price for support contracts for the newly open source QFS and SAM. And it might even be interesting to see this code ported to Windows or other Unixes, if that is even possible in the case of the former.

Anyway, you can get the SAM-QFS code at this link. It is the latest development release created by Sun's programmers.

The open sourcing of SAM and QFS follows only a few weeks after Sun took the code behind its "Honeycomb" StorageTek 5800 fixed data disk array software under a BSD license. Sun chose the CDDL license that it created for OpenSolaris for the SAM-QFS combo.

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